Paul Patrick

Edge of Mars’ great dichotomy eroded back by hundreds of kilometers

erosion, geology, Mars, oceans, planetary science, Science / Paul Patrick / January 20, 2025

A shoreline transformed?

The huge area covered by these mounds gives a sense of just how significant this erosion was. “The dichotomy boundary has receded several hundred kilometres,” the researchers note. “Nearly all intervening material—approximately 57,000 cubic kilometers over an area of 284,000 square kilometers west of Ares Vallis alone—has been removed, leaving only remnant mounds.”

Based on the distribution of the different clays, the team argues that their water-driven formation took place before the erosion of the material. This would indicate that water-rock interactions were going on over a very wide region early in the history of Mars, which likely required an extensive hydrological cycle on the red planet. As the researchers note, a nearby ocean would have improved the chances of exposing this region to water, but the exposure could also have been due to processes like melting at the base of an ice cap.

Complicating matters further, many of the mounds top out below one proposed shoreline of the northern ocean and above a second. It’s possible that a receding ocean could have contributed to their erosion. But, at the same time, some of the features of a proposed shoreline now appear to have been caused by the general erosion of the original plateau, and may not be associated with an ocean at all.

Overall, the new results provide mixed evidence for the presence of a Martian ocean. They clearly show an active water cycle and erosion on a massive scale, which are both consistent with having a lot of water around. At the same time, however, the water exposure the mesas and buttes have experienced needn’t have come through their being submerged by said ocean and, given their elevation, might best be explained through some other process.

Nature Geoscience, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01634-8 (About DOIs).

Edge of Mars’ great dichotomy eroded back by hundreds of kilometers Read More »

Robotic hand helps pianists overcome “ceiling effect”

robotic exoskeleton, robotics, Science / Paul Patrick / January 20, 2025

Fast and complex multi-finger movements generated by the hand exoskeleton. Credit: Shinichi Furuya

When it comes to fine-tuned motor skills like playing the piano, practice, they say, makes perfect. But expert musicians often experience a “ceiling effect,” in which their skill level plateaus after extensive training. Passive training using a robotic exoskeleton hand could help pianists overcome that ceiling effect, according to a paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed. Per the authors, prior studies with robotic exoskeletons focused on simpler movements, such as assisting in the movement of limbs stabilizing body posture, or helping grasp objects. That sets the custom robotic hand used in these latest experiments apart from those used for haptics in virtual environments.

A helping robot hand

A total of 118 pianists participated in three different experiments. In the first, 30 pianists performed a designated “chord trill” motor task with the piano at home every day for two weeks: first simultaneously striking D and F keys with the right index and ring fingers, then striking the E and G keys with the right middle and little fingers. “We used this task because it has been widely recognized as technically challenging to play quickly and accurately,” the authors explained. It appears in such classical pieces as Chopin’s Etude Op. 25. No. 6, Maurice Ravel’s “Ondine,” and the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 3.

Robotic hand helps pianists overcome “ceiling effect” Read More »

TikTok is mostly restored after Trump pledges an order and half US ownership

bytedance, Donald Trump, Policy, President Donald Trump, Tech, tiktok / Paul Patrick / January 20, 2025

At a rally Sunday, he did not clarify if this meant a US-based business or the government itself. “So they’ll have a partner, the United States, and they’ll have a lot of bidders … And there’s no risk, we’re not putting up any money. All we’re doing is giving them the approval without which they don’t have anything,” Trump said Sunday.

Legal limbo

Trump’s order, and TikTok’s return to service, both seem at odds with the law—and leadership in the Republican party. Speaker Mike Johnson said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that Congress would “enforce the law.” Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) issued a joint statement Sunday, commending Apple, Microsoft, and Google for “following the law,” and noting that other companies “face ruinous bankruptcy” for violating it.

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” the statement read. The law states that “A path to executing a qualified divestiture” has to be determined before a one-time extension of 90 days can be granted.

TikTok’s best chance at avoiding a shutdown vanished in last week’s unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding the divest-or-sell law. Aimed at protecting national security interests from TikTok’s Chinese owners having access to the habits and data of 170 million American users, the law was ruled to be “content-neutral,” and that the US “had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment.”

Reports at Forbes, Bloomberg, and elsewhere have suggested that ByteDance and its Chinese owners could be seeking to use TikTok as a bargaining chip, with maneuvers including a sale to Trump ally Elon Musk as a means of counteracting Trump’s proposed tariffs on Chinese imports.

One largely unforeseen side effect of Congress’ TikTok-centered actions is that Marvel Snap, a mobile collectible card and deck-building game, disappeared in similar fashion over the weekend. The game, developed by a California-based team, is published by ByteDance’s Nuverse mobile game division. With no web version available, Snap remained unavailable on app stores Monday morning. A message to players with the game installed noted that “This outage is a surprise to us and wasn’t planned,” though it pledged to restore the game.

TikTok is mostly restored after Trump pledges an order and half US ownership Read More »

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants?

coal, coal power, Policy, power plant, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / January 18, 2025

A growth in electricity demand is leading to talk of delayed closures.

A house is seen near the Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio. Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

In October, I wrote about how five of the country’s 10 largest coal-fired power plants had retirement dates. Today, I’m revisiting the list, providing some updates and then taking a few steps back to look at US coal plants as a whole. Consider this the “before” picture that can be judged against the “after” in four years.

Some coal plant owners have already pushed back retirement timetables. The largest example, this one from just before the election, is the Gibson plant in Indiana, the second-largest coal plant in the country. It’s set to close in 2038 instead of 2035, following an announcement in October from the owner, Duke Energy.

But the changes do not constitute a coal comeback in this country. For that to happen, power companies would need to be building new plants to replace the many that are closing, and there is almost no development of new coal plants.

That said, there have been some changes since October.

As recently as a few months ago, Southern Co. was saying it intended to close Plant Bowen in Georgia by 2035 at the latest. Bowen is the largest coal plant in the country, with a summer capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Southern has since said it may extend the plant’s life in response to forecasts of rising electricity demand. Chris Womack, Southern’s CEO, confirmed this possibility when speaking at a utility industry conference in November, saying that the plant may need to operate for longer than previously planned because of demand from data centers.

Southern has not yet made regulatory filings that spell out its plans, but this will likely occur in the next few weeks, according to a company spokesman.

In October, I reported that the Gavin plant in Ohio was likely to get a 2031 date to retire or switch to a different fuel once the plant’s pending sale was completed. The person who shared that information with me was involved with the plans and spoke on condition of anonymity because the sale was not final.

Since then, the prospective buyer of the plant has said in federal regulatory filings that it has no timetable for closing the plant or switching to a different fuel. The plant is changing hands as part of a larger deal between investment firms, with Lightstone Holdco selling to Energy Capital Partners, or ECP. Another company, coal exporter Javelin Global Commodities, is buying a minority share of the Gavin plant.

I went back to the person who told me about the 2031 retirement date. They said forecasts of rising electricity demand, as well as the election of Trump, have created enough uncertainty about power prices and regulations that it makes sense to not specify a date.

The 2031 timeline, and its abandonment, makes some sense once you understand that the Biden administration finalized power plant regulations last spring that gave coal plant operators an incentive to announce a retirement date: Plants closing before 2032 faced no new requirements. That incentive is likely to go away as Trump plans to roll back power plant pollution regulations.

Gavin’s sale is still pending. Several parties have filed objections to the transaction with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, arguing that the sellers have not been clear enough about their plans.

An ECP spokesman said the company has no comment beyond its filings.

Other than the changes to plans for Bowen and Gavin, the outlook has not shifted for the rest of the plants among the 10 largest. The Gibson and Rockport plants in Indiana still have retirement dates, as do Cumberland in Tennessee and Monroe in Michigan, according to the plants’ owners.

The Amos plant in West Virginia, Miller in Alabama, Scherer in Georgia, and Parish in Texas didn’t have retirement dates a few months ago, and they still don’t.

But the largest coal plants are only part of the story. Several dozen smaller plants are getting extensions of retirement plans, as Emma Foehringer Merchant reported last week for Floodlight News.

One example is the 1,157-megawatt Baldwin plant in Illinois, which was scheduled to close this year. Now the owner, Vistra Corp., has pushed back the retirement to 2027.

A few extra years of a coal plant is more of a stopgap than a long-term solution. When it comes to building new power plants to meet demand, developers are talking about natural gas, solar, nuclear, and other resources, but I have yet to see a substantial discussion of building a new coal plant.

In Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has said the state may build two coal plants to provide power in remote mining areas, as reported by Taylor Kuykendall of S&P Global Commodity Insights. Flatlands Energy, a Canadian company, has also talked about building a 400-megawatt coal plant in Alaska, as Nathaniel Herz reported for Alaska Beacon. These appear to be early-stage plans.

The lack of development activity underscores how coal power is fading in this country, and has been for a while.

Coal was used to generate 16 percent of US electricity in 2023, down by more than half from 2014. In that time, coal went from the country’s leading fuel for electricity to trailing natural gas, renewables, and nuclear. (These and all the figures that follow are from the US Energy Information Administration.)

The United States had about 176,000 megawatts of coal plant capacity as of October, down from about 300,000 megawatts in 2014.

The coal plants that do remain are being used less. In 2023, the average capacity factor for a coal plant was 42 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a plant has generated relative to the maximum possible if it was running all the time. In 2014, the average capacity factor was 61 percent.

Power companies are burning less coal because of the availability of less expensive alternatives, such as natural gas, wind, and solar, among others. The think tank Energy Innovation issued a report in 2023 finding that 99 percent of US coal-fired power plants cost more to operate than the cost of replacement with a combination of wind, solar, and batteries.

The Trump administration will arrive in Washington with promises to help fossil fuels. It could extend the lives of some coal plants by weakening environmental regulations, which may reduce the plants’ operational costs. It also could repeal or revise subsidies that help to reduce the costs of renewables and batteries, making those resources more expensive.

I don’t want to minimize the damage that could be caused by those policies. But even in extreme scenarios, it’s difficult to imagine investors wanting to spend billions of dollars to develop a new coal plant, much less a fleet of them.

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants? Read More »

GM faces ban on selling driver data that can be used to raise insurance rates

Cars, data brokers, General Motors, OnStar, Policy / Paul Patrick / January 17, 2025

The FTC said its complaint alleged that “GM used a misleading enrollment process to get consumers to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and the OnStar Smart Driver feature.” Lina Khan, who is in her final week as FTC chair, said that “GM monitored and sold people’s precise geolocation data and driver behavior information, sometimes as often as every three seconds.”

Settlement not quite finalized

The proposed settlement was approved in a closed meeting by the FTC’s three Democrats, with the two Republicans recorded as absent. The pending agreement will be subject to public comment for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, and a final FTC decision will be made under the Trump administration.

In addition to location data, the GM/FTC settlement covers “radio listening data regarding specific content, channel, or station; hard braking, hard acceleration, hard cornering, crossing of a designated high-speed threshold, seat belt usage, or late-night driving; and trip time and duration for such events.” GM and OnStar agreed to delete data collected before the settlement and ask third parties to delete data previously shared with them.

GM also “must allow consumers to disable the collection of Location Data from their Vehicles to the extent the Vehicle is equipped with the necessary technology.”

GM issued a press release on the settlement. “Last year, we discontinued Smart Driver across all GM vehicles, unenrolled all customers, and ended our third-party telematics relationships with LexisNexis and Verisk,” GM said. “In September, we consolidated many of our US privacy statements into a single, simpler statement as part of our broader work to keep raising the bar on privacy… As part of the agreement, GM will obtain affirmative customer consent to collect, use, or disclose certain types of connected vehicle data (with exceptions for certain purposes).”

Affirmative consent is not required for purposes such as providing driver data to emergency responders, responding to customer-initiated communications, complying with government requests and legal requirements, and investigating product quality or safety problems. While the ban on sharing driving data lasts only five years, the overall settlement would be in place for 20 years.

GM faces ban on selling driver data that can be used to raise insurance rates Read More »

TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, First Amendment, free speech, national security, Online speech, Policy, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, tiktok, TikTok ban / Paul Patrick / January 17, 2025

TikTok has said it’s preparing to shut down Sunday.

A TikTok influencer holds a sign that reads “Keep TikTok” outside the US Supreme Court Building as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Stringer | Getty Images News

TikTok has lost its Supreme Court appeal in a 9–0 decision and will likely shut down on January 19, a day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, unless the app can be sold before the deadline, which TikTok has said is impossible.

During the trial last Friday, TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco warned SCOTUS that upholding the Biden administration’s divest-or-sell law would likely cause TikTok to “go dark—essentially the platform shuts down” and “essentially… stop operating.” On Wednesday, TikTok reportedly began preparing to shut down the app for all US users, anticipating the loss.

But TikTok’s claims that the divest-or-sell law violated Americans’ free speech rights did not supersede the government’s compelling national security interest in blocking a foreign adversary like China from potentially using the app to spy on or influence Americans, SCOTUS ruled.

“We conclude that the challenged provisions do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights,” the SCOTUS opinion said, while acknowledging that “there is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community.”

Late last year, TikTok and its owner, the Chinese-owned company ByteDance, urgently pushed SCOTUS to intervene before the law’s January 19 enforcement date. Ahead of SCOTUS’ decision, TikTok warned it would have no choice but to abruptly shut down a thriving platform where many Americans get their news, express their views, and make a living.

The US had argued the law was necessary to protect national security interests as the US-China trade war intensifies, alleging that China could use the app to track and influence TikTok’s 170 million American users. A lower court had agreed that the US had a compelling national security interest and rejected arguments that the law violated the First Amendment, triggering TikTok’s appeal to SCOTUS. Today, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

According to SCOTUS, the divest-or-sell law is “content-neutral” and only triggers intermediate scrutiny. That requires that the law doesn’t burden “substantially more speech than necessary” to serve the government’s national security interests, rather than strict scrutiny which would force the government to protect those interests through the least restrictive means.

Further, the government was right to single TikTok out, SCOTUS wrote, due to its “scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects.”

“Preventing China from collecting vast amounts of sensitive data from 170 million US TikTok users” is a “decidedly content agnostic” rationale, justices wrote.

“The Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment,” the opinion said.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted a statement on TikTok reacting to the ruling, thanking Trump for committing to “work with TikTok” to avoid a shut down and telling users to “rest assured, we will do everything in our power to ensure our platform thrives” in the US.

Momentum to ban TikTok has shifted

First Amendment advocates condemned the SCOTUS ruling. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “major blow to freedom of expression online,” and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene accused justices of sweeping “past the undisputed content-based justification for the law” to “rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns.”

While the SCOTUS ruling was unanimous, justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “precedent leaves no doubt” that the law implicated the First Amendment and “plainly” imposed a burden on any US company that distributes TikTok’s speech and any content creator who preferred TikTok as a publisher of their speech.

Similarly concerned was justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote in his concurring opinion that he harbors “serious reservations about whether the law before us is ‘content neutral’ and thus escapes ‘strict scrutiny.'” Gorsuch also said he didn’t know “whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends.”

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality,” Gorsuch wrote. “Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional.”

For TikTok and content creators defending the app, the stakes were incredibly high. TikTok repeatedly denied there was any evidence of spying and warned that enforcing the law would allow the government to unlawfully impose “a massive and unprecedented speech restriction.”

But the Supreme Court declined to order a preliminary injunction to block the law until Trump took office, instead deciding to rush through oral arguments and reach a decision prior to the law’s enforcement deadline. Now TikTok has little recourse if it wishes to maintain US operations, as justices suggested during the trial that even if a president chose to not enforce the law, providing access to TikTok or enabling updates could be viewed as too risky for app stores or other distributors.

The law at the center of the case—the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—had strong bipartisan support under the Biden administration.

But President-elect Donald Trump said he opposed a TikTok ban, despite agreeing that US national security interests in preventing TikTok spying on or manipulating Americans were compelling. And this week, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has introduced a bill to extend the deadline ahead of a potential TikTok ban, and a top Trump adviser, Congressman Mike Waltz, has said that Trump plans to stop the ban and “keep TikTok from going dark,” the BBC reported. Even the Biden administration, whose justice department just finished arguing why the US needed to enforce the law to SCOTUS, “is considering ways to keep TikTok available,” sources told NBC News.

“What might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch noted in the opinion.

Will Trump save TikTok?

It will likely soon be clear whether Trump will intervene. Trump filed a brief in December, requesting that the Supreme Court stay enforcement of the law until after he takes office because allegedly only he could make a deal to save TikTok. He criticized SCOTUS for rushing the decision and suggested that Congress’ passage of the law may have been “legislative encroachment” that potentially “binds his hands” as president.

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

TikTok’s CEO Chew signaled to users that Trump is expected to step in.

“On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” Chew’s statement said.

Chew also reminded Trump that he has 60 billion views of his content on TikTok and perhaps stands to lose a major platform through the ban.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform, one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives,” Chew said.

Trump seemingly has limited options to save TikTok, Forbes suggested. At trial, justices disagreed on whether Trump could legally decide to simply not enforce the law. And efforts to pause enforcement or claim compliance without evidence that ByteDance is working on selling off TikTok could be blocked by the court, analysts said. And while ByteDance has repeatedly said it’s unwilling to sell TikTok US, it’s possible, one analyst suggested to Forbes, that ByteDance might be more willing to divest “in exchange for Trump backing off his threat of high tariffs on Chinese imports.”

On Tuesday, a Bloomberg report suggested that China was considering whether selling TikTok to Elon Musk might be a good bargaining chip to de-escalate Trump’s attacks in the US-China trade war.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday Read More »

Meta Pivots on Content Moderation

Pivots / Paul Patrick / January 17, 2025

There’s going to be some changes made.

Mark Zuckerberg has decided that with Donald Trump soon to be in office, he is allowed to care about free speech again. And he has decided it is time to admit that what was called ‘fact checking’ meant he had for years been running a giant hugely biased, trigger-happy and error prone left-wing censorship and moderation machine that had standards massively out of touch with ordinary people and engaged in automated taking down of often innocent accounts.

He also admits that the majority of censorship in the past has flat out been a mistake.

Zuckerberg later talked more about this, and many related and unrelated things, on the Joe Rogan podcast. He says many fun things, like that most companies need ‘more masculine energy’ to balance their feminine energy, and he gives his usual terrible takes on AI which I cover elsewhere.

Zuckerberg is going to overhaul Meta’s entire moderation and censorship structure, replacing it over several months with something akin to community notes. He’s going to move standards back in line with actual community standards. And he’s going to move his content moderation teams from California to Texas, and push back against censorship worldwide, highlighting Europe and Latin America.

The current review process reportedly started when one of Zuckerberg’s own posts got throttled because of concerns over medical content, and then snowballed from there.

How did it all go so wrong? Zuckerberg tells the story on Rogan, that he took complaints about misinformation and the need for fact checking as sincere, then after he hired people for this the slippery slope took over and before long they were censoring things that are in the mainstream discourse.

Here is a parallel discussion, about similar pressures at Zuckerberg’s philanthropy efforts, where he got asked to resign from Facebook during a staff meeting for insufficiently moderating the actual sitting President of the United States.

Matthew Yglesias: Lots of moderate people end up embracing conservatism because of backlash against left-wing excess, but it’s funny to do it when the left-wing excess was literally your own hiring and business decisions.

Kelsey Piper: I think reasonably often middle-aged people hired recent college graduates through pipelines that had historically produced nice moderate liberals like themselves and discovered in shock that now they were producing illiberal leftists who thought the org should be run their way.

Of course the correct response here is to fire this person and hire the people you meant to hire, but hiring is hard and the people you wanted were suddenly hard to find and the existing processes were not producing them.

I know of a number of nonprofits that had an unpleasant shock waking up to this. Some said “wait, no, this isn’t what we’re doing” and had internal drama as they parted with the illiberal employees and survived. Some did not.

But I think it took a really unusual level of institutional leadership and courage to go in 2020 “what? no. that’s not what we’re doing here. if you want to do that, leave.” And the orgs where it did happen tended to keep it quiet so they wouldn’t be a target of outrage.

Also he claims the Biden administration would yell and threaten various people in phone calls, demanded they take down even true information about Covid if it would discourage vaccinations, said not doing so was ‘killing people,’ and when Zuckerberg drew the line at censoring true information (I’d say, ‘somewhat?’) the Biden administration suddenly made good on its jawboning threats and all the investigations came down on Meta’s head.

That’s his story. We have at least some documentary evidence that Facebook responded to White House demands by censoring and removing posts that ‘did not contain actionable misinformation.’ Some more evidence is this Patrick McKenzie report of his volunteers at VaccinateCA getting blocked on Facebook back in 2021 for their ‘unusual interest patterns.’ You can decide how much to believe Zuckerberg’s account of all this.

Now that the Biden administration is on its way out, and the vibes have shifted, it’s time for a change. Zuckerberg explicitly says he waited until after the election (partly because during one is an awkward time for major changes) and that he was deciding largely based on the vibe shifts.

Benjamin Hoffman: Zuckerberg is not literally a liberal; he’s a pragmatist used to passing as a good-enough simulacrum of a liberal to make other people doing the same feel comfortable with him.

If he were literally a liberal Facebook’s behavior in the past few years would have been liberal.

If he were even trying to be mistaken for literally a liberal, his explanation of Facebook’s censorship policy change would have been in terms of a subversion he’s noticing & correcting rather than in terms of vibe shift.

Having listened to the Rogan podcast, I do think Zuckerberg has some amount of preference for more free speech and other classical liberal preferences, but yes it all primarily sounds very pragmatic, and he’s definitely not left-wing in today’s parlance.

I also agree with DHH here that it would have been highly supererogatory for Zuckerberg to make these changes before Trump’s win rather than after, and that Zuckerberg has earned no one’s trust yet, but that it is not a reasonable ask to expect him to have done all this earlier, even if you don’t fully buy his stories about the Federal government half going to war against him.

So what to do now? He’s going to focus his filters, rather than scanning for any violation at all, on illegal and high severity violations, and only act on low severity actions if and when someone reports them. I worry that if this is the policy than there will be various people who decide it is their job to use their AIs (or just their eyes) to go searching for violations to report, but it would still have humans in the loop in every step.

Whereas ‘the filters make mistakes’ so he’s going to dial them back and require a lot more confidence than before (yes this is a trade-off, he discusses it more on Rogan, but there’s a lot of ‘what the hell were we doing before?’ here), essentially also admitting that there was no way to appeal to humans when those mistakes happened, or that those answering those appeals were insane. He’s going to ‘reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.’

And accounts? Yeah, this kind of used to happen a lot, with no way to fix the mistakes. The first reaction I saw to this change was ‘I’ll believe this change matters when [X]’s account, which was banned without explanation, gets reversed.

I don’t see any indication of a plan to undo the mistakes of the past here?

He says they’re going to ‘bring back more civic posts,’ because people want to see such content again. Why not let people choose which content they want to see?

These are all highly welcome changes, especially the move to Community Notes and generally vastly raising the bar before things are censored, even if he basically admits that he was previously ‘going with the flow’ and bowing to pressure, and now he’s bowing to a different kind of pressure.

I hate to kick even this man while he’s making great changes. I want to be clear, my primary response is that these are centrally great changes.

It also seems like we need more before we can properly move on. There’s a lot of ‘you were doing WHAT?’ moments here, and a lot of ‘when did who know what about that exactly?’ all of which should rise to the level of requiring Truth and Reconciliation.

In particular, we need a blanket reinstatement of accounts whose violations would not get you banned under the new rules. Meta’s AI can presumably do reviews of the past content based on new standards and reinstate many accounts. The new Texas crew can then manually review any cases where confidence is not super high.

I also agree with Aella that if your platform bans porn, it isn’t really allowing free speech, which is especially relevant to Instagram for obvious reasons.

Nate Silver writes of The Rise and Fall of Fact Checking. He points out that a lot of the bias in fact checking is in selecting what to ‘fact check,’ which usually targets unresolved or unresolvable claims, because if it was resolvable you didn’t need a fact check. And that ‘fact checking’ ended up often being a way to use an argument from ‘no evidence’ to call things the fact checkers disliked ‘misinformation,’ and the whole enterprise often aims primarily to scaffold and support a narrative.

Whereas the best use of professional and distinct fact checkers is to use them on yourself, as Nate Silver did for his book On the Edge. I would love to have the ability to do this prior to publication, but speed premium does not allow it.

If you want more detail on how insane ‘fact checkers’ and their claims of ‘misinformation’ had gotten, you can see this good post by John Barro. It was clear for a long time, but the treatment by such people of claims about Biden’s declining health made how they work fully common knowledge.

That post includes this quote for the ages from one such person:

Josh Barro: “Of course,” van der Linden replied. “We can’t just be saying random stuff without expert assessment, especially on medical issues.”

Any questions?

Advocates for such policies are, as you would expect, ‘having a normal one.’

Casey Newton (Headline): Meta Surrenders to the right on speech.

“I really think this is a precursor for genocide,” a former employee tells Platformer.

One could say Zuckerberg ‘surrendered on speech’ by deciding that he is for it.

Or more elegantly, chef’s kiss:

To be fair to Newton, it sounds like the end of fact checking was relatively non-alarming to Meta employees, who were instead worried about the loosening of the content guidelines and thresholds. He cites, as many others did, the one especially bonkers policy, which is the main topic of the next section.

But the logic being argued for by such advocates is clear. They think that free speech causes harm, for very broad values of harm, so they are against free speech.

The Babylon Bee offers a thread of past ‘fact checks’ of its satirical posts. Many of these are pretty funny. The fact checks only make them funnier.

This is a good time to check out Asterisk’s piece on The Making of Community Notes.

There are also some… interesting choices in the new content policy?

Reading the entire rationale is looking into a world and philosophy very different from my own. I do want to emphasize that getting this kind of thing right is very difficult, mistakes will be made especially at first, they have to worry about laws and customs around the world very different from our own, and all that. It’s hard.

Alexa Corse, Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz: Meta on Tuesday also revised community standards to significantly loosen restrictions on content previously considered hate speech. For example, the updated rules permit “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” and strike down a prohibition on comparing women to “household objects or property.”

Specifically, Meta’s policy includes: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.””

Victoria: According to Meta’s new community standards and how it defines hateful conduct, it is a violation of policy to call someone mentally ill or abnormal – unless that person is trans or gay. What the actual f.

Both Claude and I think Victoria’s statement is accurate here? Which seems rather insane. I’m basically fine with ‘no one gets to call anyone mentally ill’ if you want to go that way. I’m also basically fine with ‘everyone gets to call everyone mentally ill for pretty much any reason, there’s a block button for a reason.’ But this? What?

It’s even weirder when the whole concept is general prohibition of attacks on individuals on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’ (unfortunate acronym PC) that includes sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. What are we even doing?

At some point, [X] is going to say ‘[Y] is mentally ill’ and [Y] is going to say ‘how dare you accuse me of being mentally ill simply because I am mentally ill!’ and [X] is going to replay ‘it’s okay under Facebook rules, because that’s not why I said it. I said it because of your gender identity.’

404 Media is reporting this is causing ‘total chaos internally at Meta,’ based on having talked to five people. I am guessing it was not total chaos at Meta, but that there were people who were very understandably upset.

There’s also this rather amazing special exception for those breaking up:

Meta: Tier 2 not allowed: Targeted cursing, except certain gender-based cursing in a romantic break-up context, defined as:

Targeted use of “f” or variations of “f” with intent to insult, such as “Fthe [Protected Characteristic]!”

Terms or phrases calling for engagement in sexual activity [or contact with various things.]

This isn’t an accident:

Finally, sometimes people curse at a gender in the context of a romantic break-up. Our policies are designed to allow room for these types of speech.

Movie ideas:

Two people agree to fake a breakup in order to justify speech on Facebook. The speech escalates, they fight and targe each other for real, they of course fall in love.
Two people are breaking up, but neither wants to alter their relationship status on Facebook, because the other would then be able to post horrible things about them. So they have to keep pretending they are together. You know the rest.
1. Bonus version: A version set in a slightly different policy, where whoever changes their status first, the other one gets to do this as the dumped person. So the two of them do increasingly convoluted things to get the other to change their status and acknowledge the breakup.

Finally, there’s this, and I don’t know if they thought this through or not?

Do not post:

Content explicitly providing or offering to provide products or services that aim to change people’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

I expect the change in approach to content moderation to be broadly permanent at Meta and elsewhere, unless it is brought down by foreign legal action.

I expect the new equilibrium to have a meaningful much higher level of allowed speech across the board.

That doesn’t mean every individual change will stick. While humans are in charge, we will continue the dance of fighting over exactly what the rules are and should be. There are some rather obviously ludicrous rules that were discussed in the last section, hopefully they will quickly be addressed.

The biggest threat to the new equilibrium will be foreign governments demanding various forms of censorship, especially the European Union. Facebook and Instagram are likely for this purpose a much bigger deal than Twitter, so they should put up a real fight, as their position on free speech is that they are strongly against it. I don’t know what will happen there. So far things seem unexpectedly quiet.

Indeed, the action we have is that Google is flat out telling the EU no on its legal demand that search results and YouTube videos use fact checkers and then use the results in ranking or removing content. Google says this ‘simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services’ which is very true. Google says this won’t come as news to the relevant officials, who have been informed Google will ‘pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA code of conduct.’

Something will have to give. The European Union is saying ‘thou shalt censor the ways we want’ and our largest tech companies are saying, ‘no actually we shalt not.’

I don’t know what happens. The EU demands here are not reasonable, but the EU very much sees it the other way around. If no one backs down, eventually the internet is going to fracture. I am confident Google and Meta do not intend to back down.

On a personal level, this makes it in theory possible to consider posting on Instagram or Facebook at all. When I was posting on Covid, I had requests to post my content to Facebook to help reach people who would not otherwise see it. I was already Against Facebook (with follow-ups) back in 2017, but when I considered reconsidering, I realized that if I posted my content there I would likely get my account banned. I want to keep access to my accounts with Meta, especially WhatsApp and using Facebook as a rolodex, so that wasn’t an option.

(In terms of contacting me, I will see friend requests and Facebook Messenger messages about once every few months, with a roughly Poisson distribution, and will approximately never see a Facebook post of any kind.)

Once these changes are made, it becomes an option again. I see no particular reason to take it, but doing a bit of exploration and controlled experimentation is non-crazy, and I will consider what might make sense.

Discussion about this post

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FCC chair makes one last stand against Trump’s call to punish news stations

brendan carr, Donald Trump, FCC, jessica rosenworcel, Policy / Paul Patrick / January 16, 2025

FCC not the president’s speech police (yet)

Chair: Complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel testifies during a House hearing on Thursday, May 16, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams

Taking action in the final days of the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission dismissed three complaints and a petition filed against broadcast television stations. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the action is important because “the incoming President has called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke licenses for broadcast television stations because he disagrees with their content and coverage.”

“Today, I have directed the FCC to take a stand on behalf of the First Amendment,” she said. “We draw a bright line at a moment when clarity about government interference with the free press is needed more than ever. The action we take makes clear two things. First, the FCC should not be the president’s speech police. Second, the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s chosen replacement for Rosenworcel, Commissioner Brendan Carr, wants the FCC to punish news broadcasters that he perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general. Backing Trump’s various complaints about news stations, Carr has threatened to revoke licenses by wielding the FCC’s authority to ensure that broadcasters using public airwaves operate in the public interest.

Rosenworcel said the complaints and petition she is dismissing “come from all corners—right and left—but what they have in common is they ask the FCC to penalize broadcast television stations because they dislike station behavior, content, or coverage.” After Trump criticized CBS in October, Rosenworcel said the agency “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

Chair: Complaints aim to “weaponize” FCC authority

The Center for American Rights filed complaints supporting Trump’s claims of bias regarding ABC’s fact-checking during a presidential debate, the editing of a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and NBC putting Harris on a Saturday Night Live episode. Separately, the Media and Democracy Project filed a petition to deny a license renewal for WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, a station owned and operated by Fox, alleging that Fox willfully distorted news with false reports of fraud in the 2020 election that Trump lost.

Rejecting all four, Rosenworcel said “the facts and legal circumstances in each of these cases are different. But what they share is that they seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment. To do so would set a dangerous precedent. That is why we reject it here.”

Dismissing complaints isn’t likely to end the cases, said Jeffrey Westling, a lawyer at the conservative American Action Forum who has urged Congress to “limit or revoke the FCC’s authority to impose content-based restrictions on broadcast television.”

Westling said he agrees “substantively” with Rosenworcel, but added that “the DC Circuit Court has made clear that the FCC has to consider news distortion complaints (see Serafyn vs FCC) and not just dismiss them outright. If I am the complainants, I challenge these dismissals in court, win, and get more attention.”

When contacted by Ars today, the Center for American Rights provided a statement criticizing Rosenworcel’s decision as “political and self-serving.”

“We fundamentally believe that several actions taken by the three major networks were partisan, dishonest and designed to support Vice President Harris in her bid to become President,” the group said. “We will continue to pursue avenues to ensure the American public is protected from media manipulation of our Republic. The First Amendment does not protect intentional misrepresentation or fraud.”

The group previously touted the fact that Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington urged FCC leadership to take its complaints seriously.

Fox ruling will be challenged

The Media and Democracy Project criticized Rosenworcel’s decision to dismiss its complaint against the Fox station in Philadelphia.

“We look forward to presenting on appeal the multiple court decisions that raise serious questions about the Murdochs’ and Fox’s character qualifications to remain broadcast licensees,” the Media and Democracy Project said in a statement provided to Ars. “As renowned First Amendment scholar Floyd Abrams stated in his filing with the Commission, the First Amendment is no bar to Commission action given the facts of this case. Our petition is clearly distinct from the other politically motivated complaints.”

The group’s petition pointed to a court ruling that found Fox News aired false statements about Dominion Voting Systems. Fox later agreed to pay Dominion $788 million to settle a defamation lawsuit.

“Our Petition to Deny is based on judicial findings that Fox made repeated false statements that undermined the electoral process and resulted in property damage, injury, and death; that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch engaged in a ‘carefully crafted scheme’ in ‘bad faith’ to deprive Lachlan’s siblings of the control to which they are entitled under an irrevocable trust; and that ‘Murdoch knowingly caused the corporation to violate the law,'” the Media and Democracy Project said today.

The FCC order denying the petition also granted the station’s application for a license renewal. The order said the allegations regarding “material carried on a cable network under common control with the Licensee that a state court found to be false” aren’t grounds to deny the individual station’s license renewal. While some “non-FCC-related misconduct” can be considered by the FCC in an evaluation of a licensee’s character, the finding in the defamation suit doesn’t qualify, the order said.

Former FCC official objects

Gigi Sohn, a longtime advocate whose nomination to the FCC was rejected by the Senate, also criticized the FCC today. Sohn, who also served as counselor for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama administration, called the dismissal of the Fox petition a “failure to lead.”

“As [Rosenworcel] herself points out, the facts of these petitions are very different,” Sohn wrote. “The [Media and Democracy Project] petition seeks a hearing on Fox Philadelphia licenses because they allege that Fox lacks the character to hold them because it lied to the American people about the 2020 election. The conservative complaints are all based on disagreements with editorial judgments of the various broadcast networks.”

“The decision to lump these filings together and overturn years of FCC precedent that broadcasters’ character is central to holding a license is contrary to the Communications Act’s mandate that licenses be granted in ‘the public interest, convenience and necessity,'” Sohn also wrote. The FCC rationale would mean that “anything and everything a broadcast licensee does or says would be a First Amendment issue that warrants automatic license renewal,” she added.

Media advocacy group Free Press agreed with the FCC’s decision. “We have an incoming administration quite literally threatening to jail journalists for doing their jobs, and an incoming FCC chairman talking about revoking broadcast licenses any time he disagrees with their political coverage,” the group said.

Free Press sided with the FCC despite noting that the Fox case involved “false information [that] had devastating consequences in the January 6 attack on the peaceful transition of power four years ago.”

“Lies knowingly aired by Fox News Channel and some Murdoch-owned Fox affiliates present a significantly different challenge to regulators than merely fact-checking, editing or scheduling equal time for candidates in ways that displease the president-elect,” Free Press said. “Yet we agree with the urgent need to prevent the weaponization of the government against journalists and media companies on the eve of the inauguration, and in light of the dire threats the new administration poses.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Home Microsoft 365 plans use Copilot AI features as pretext for a price hike

AI, Biz & IT, copilot, microsoft, microsoft 365, Microsoft office, Tech / Paul Patrick / January 16, 2025

Microsoft hasn’t said for how long this “limited time” offer will last, but presumably it will only last for a year or two to help ease the transition between the old pricing and the new pricing. New subscribers won’t be offered the option to pay for the Classic plans.

Subscribers on the Personal and Family plans can’t use Copilot indiscriminately; they get 60 AI credits per month to use across all the Office apps, credits that can also be used to generate images or text in Windows apps like Designer, Paint, and Notepad. It’s not clear how these will stack with the 15 credits that Microsoft offers for free for apps like Designer, or the 50 credits per month Microsoft is handing out for Image Cocreator in Paint.

Those who want unlimited usage and access to the newest AI models are still asked to pay $20 per month for a Copilot Pro subscription.

As Microsoft notes, this is the first price increase it has ever implemented for the personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions in the US, which have stayed at the same levels since being introduced as Office 365 over a decade ago. Pricing for the business plans and pricing in other countries has increased before. Pricing for Office Home 2024 ($150) and Office Home & Business 2024 ($250), which can’t access Copilot or other Microsoft 365 features, is also the same as it was before.

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Texas defends requiring ID for porn to SCOTUS: “We’ve done this forever”

age verification law, age-gating, First Amendment, free speech rights, Policy, pornography, privacy online, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, texas / Paul Patrick / January 15, 2025

“You can use VPNs, the click of a button, to make it seem like you’re not in Texas,” Shaffer argued. “You can go through the search engines, you can go through social media, you can access the same content in the ways that kids are likeliest to do.”

Texas attorney Aaron Nielson argued that the problem of kids accessing porn online has only gotten “worse” in the decades since Texas has been attempting less restrictive and allegedly less effective means like content filtering. Now, age verification is Texas’ preferred solution, and strict scrutiny shouldn’t apply to a law that just asks someone to show ID to see adult content, Nielson argued.

“In our history we have always said kids can’t come and look at this stuff,” Nielson argued. “So it seems not correct to me as a historical matter to say, well actually it’s always been presumptively unconstitutional. … But we’ve done it forever. Strict scrutiny somehow has always been satisfied.”

Like groups suing, Texas also asked the Supreme Court to be very clear when writing guidance for the 5th Circuit should the court vacate and remand the case. But Texas wants justices to reiterate that just because the case was remanded, that doesn’t mean the 5th Circuit can’t reinstitute the stay on the preliminary injunction that was ordered following the 5th Circuit’s prior review.

On rebuttal, Shaffer told SCOTUS that out of “about 20 other laws that by some views may look a lot like Texas'” law, “this is the worst of them.” He described Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a “hostile regulator who’s saying to adults, you should not be here.”

“I strongly urge this court to stick with strict scrutiny as the applicable standard of review when we’re talking about content-based burdens on speakers,” Shaffer said.

In a press release, Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that “efforts to childproof the Internet not only hurt everyone’s ability to access information, but often give the government far too much leeway to go after speech it doesn’t like—all while failing to actually protect children.”

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This PDF contains a playable copy of Doom

gaming / Paul Patrick / January 15, 2025

Here at Ars, we’re suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows’ notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.

On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format. That JS coding support—which dates back decades and is still fully documented in Adobe’s official PDF specs—is currently implemented in a more limited, more secure form as part of PDFium, the built-in PDF-rendering engine of Chromium-based browsers.

In the past, hackers have used this little-known Adobe feature to code simple games like Breakout and Tetris into PDF documents. But ading220 went further, recompiling a streamlined fork of Doom‘s open source code using an old version of Emscripten that outputs optimized asm.js code.

With that code loaded, the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate “video” output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a “pretty poor but playable” 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).

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Meta takes us a step closer to Star Trek’s universal translator

AI, Computer science, human speech, Science, text processing, translation / Paul Patrick / January 15, 2025

The computer science behind translating speech from 100 source languages.

In 2023, AI researchers at Meta interviewed 34 native Spanish and Mandarin speakers who lived in the US but didn’t speak English. The goal was to find out what people who constantly rely on translation in their day-to-day activities expect from an AI translation tool. What those participants wanted was basically a Star Trek universal translator or the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: an AI that could not only translate speech to speech in real time across multiple languages, but also preserve their voice, tone, mannerisms, and emotions. So, Meta assembled a team of over 50 people and got busy building it.

What this team came up with was a next-gen translation system called Seamless. The first building block of this system is described in Wednesday’s issue of Nature; it can translate speech among 36 different languages.

Language data problems

AI translation systems today are mostly focused on text, because huge amounts of text are available in a wide range of languages thanks to digitization and the Internet. Institutions like the United Nations or European Parliament routinely translate all their proceedings into the languages of all their member states, which means there are enormous databases comprising aligned documents prepared by professional human translators. You just needed to feed those huge, aligned text corpora into neural nets (or hidden Markov models before neural nets became all the rage) and you ended up with a reasonably good machine translation system. But there were two problems with that.

The first issue was those databases comprised formal documents, which made the AI translators default to the same boring legalese in the target language even if you tried to translate comedy. The second problem was speech—none of this included audio data.

The problem of language formality was mostly solved by including less formal sources like books, Wikipedia, and similar material in AI training databases. The scarcity of aligned audio data, however, remained. Both issues were at least theoretically manageable in high-resource languages like English or Spanish, but they got dramatically worse in low-resource languages like Icelandic or Zulu.

As a result, the AI translators we have today support an impressive number of languages in text, but things are complicated when it comes to translating speech. There are cascading systems that simply do this trick in stages. An utterance is first converted to text just as it would be in any dictation service. Then comes text-to-text translation, and finally the resulting text in the target language is synthesized into speech. Because errors accumulate at each of those stages, the performance you get this way is usually poor, and it doesn’t work in real time.

A few systems that can translate speech-to-speech directly do exist, but in most cases they only translate into English and not in the opposite way. Your foreign language interlocutor can say something to you in one of the languages supported by tools like Google’s AudioPaLM, and they will translate that to English speech, but you can’t have a conversation going both ways.

So, to pull off the Star Trek universal translator thing Meta’s interviewees dreamt about, the Seamless team started with sorting out the data scarcity problem. And they did it in a quite creative way.

Building a universal language

Warren Weaver, a mathematician and pioneer of machine translation, argued in 1949 that there might be a yet undiscovered universal language working as a common base of human communication. This common base of all our communication was exactly what the Seamless team went for in its search for data more than 70 years later. Weaver’s universal language turned out to be math—more precisely, multidimensional vectors.

Machines do not understand words as humans do. To make sense of them, they need to first turn them into sequences of numbers that represent their meaning. Those sequences of numbers are numerical vectors that are termed word embeddings. When you vectorize tens of millions of documents this way, you’ll end up with a huge multidimensional space where words with similar meaning that often go together, like “tea” and “coffee,” are placed close to each other. When you vectorize aligned text in two languages like those European Parliament proceedings, you end up with two separate vector spaces, and then you can run a neural net to learn how those two spaces map onto each other.

But the Meta team didn’t have those nicely aligned texts for all the languages they wanted to cover. So, they vectorized all texts in all languages as if they were just a single language and dumped them into one embedding space called SONAR (Sentence-level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations). Once the text part was done, they went to speech data, which was vectorized using a popular W2v (word to vector) tool and added it to the same massive multilingual, multimodal space. Of course, each embedding carried metadata identifying its source language and whether it was text or speech before vectorization.

The team just used huge amounts of raw data—no fancy human labeling, no human-aligned translations. And then, the data mining magic happened.

SONAR embeddings represented entire sentences instead of single words. Part of the reason behind that was to control for differences between morphologically rich languages, where a single word may correspond to multiple words in morphologically simple languages. But the most important thing was that it ensured that sentences with similar meaning in multiple languages ended up close to each other in the vector space.

It was the same story with speech, too—a spoken sentence in one language was close to spoken sentences in other languages with similar meaning. It even worked between text and speech. So, the team simply assumed that embeddings in two different languages or two different modalities (speech or text) that are at a sufficiently close distance to each other are equivalent to the manually aligned texts of translated documents.

This produced huge amounts of automatically aligned data. The Seamless team suddenly got access to millions of aligned texts, even in low-resource languages, along with thousands of hours of transcribed audio. And they used all this data to train their next-gen translator.

Seamless translation

The automatically generated data set was augmented with human-curated texts and speech samples where possible and used to train multiple AI translation models. The largest one was called SEAMLESSM4T v2. It could translate speech to speech from 101 source languages into any of 36 output languages, and translate text to text. It would also work as an automatic speech recognition system in 96 languages, translate speech to text from 101 into 96 languages, and translate text to speech from 96 into 36 languages—all from a single unified model. It also outperformed state-of-the-art cascading systems by 8 percent in a speech-to-text and by 23 percent in a speech-to-speech translations based on the scores in Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (an algorithm commonly used to evaluate the quality of machine translation).

But it can now do even more than that. The Nature paper published by Meta’s Seamless ends at the SEAMLESSM4T models, but Nature has a long editorial process to ensure scientific accuracy. The paper published on January 15, 2025, was submitted in late November 2023. But in a quick search of the arXiv.org, a repository of not-yet-peer-reviewed papers, you can find the details of two other models that the Seamless team has already integrated on top of the SEAMLESSM4T: SeamlessStreaming and SeamlessExpressive, which take this AI even closer to making a Star Trek universal translator a reality.

SeamlessStreaming is meant to solve the translation latency problem. The baseline SEAMLESSM4T, despite all the bells and whistles, worked as a standard AI translation tool. You had to say what you wanted to say, push “translate,” and it spat out the translation. SeamlessStreaming was designed to take this experience a bit closer to what human simultaneous translator do—it translates what you’re saying as you speak in a streaming fashion. SeamlessExpressive, on the other hand, is aimed at preserving the way you express yourself in translations. When you whisper or say something in a cheerful manner or shout out with anger, SeamlessExpressive will encode the features of your voice, like tone, prosody, volume, tempo, and so on, and transfer those into the output speech in the target language.

Sadly, it still can’t do both at the same time; you can only choose to go for either streaming or expressivity, at least at the moment. Also, the expressivity variant is very limited in supported languages—it only works in English, Spanish, French, and German. But at least it’s online so you can go ahead and give it a spin.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08359-z

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Author name: Paul Patrick