Ross soon cut the music and started talking, assuring his fans that he would livestream Jake Paul’s coming boxing match, even though it would violate copyright laws. “I’ll pay the fines,” he promised. Later, he streamed himself playing online slot machines and blackjack on a gambling site, Stake. Once, he streamed pornography. He has hosted Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Andrew Tate, an online influencer known for his misogyny who faces human-trafficking charges. As Ross streams, his viewers post a torrent of messages in his channel’s chat feature — some celebrating him, some abusing him with slurs.

Welcome to life on Kick, the Wild West of livestreaming — where seemingly any kind of content goes. Since it went live late last year, the upstart platform has made waves in the world of livestreaming, long dominated by Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Today, Kick has 21 million accounts, nearly twice as many as just four months ago. It has carved out a niche as the latest home for the fringes of young male viewers who spend significant time online.

Kick, an Australian company, has flourished thanks to an unusual business model. It offers eyebrow-raising multimillion dollar contracts to top streamers and takes just 5% of all streamers’ earnings, compared with a 50-50 split on Twitch, helping lure away both top Twitch stars and rank-and-file content creators who say they’ve seen a bump in earnings. But the site itself is something of a loss leader for Stake, the online casino backed by the same ownership and frequently promoted on Kick. By offering them sizable endorsement deals with Stake, Kick has also attracted mainstream stars like the rapper Drake.

Until recently, Kick employed a laissez-faire approach to content moderation, which attracted controversial characters like Ross, who was banned from Twitch earlier this year. Other streamers have filmed themselves committing apparent crimes, like trespassing and sexual assault.

To some streamers and viewers, Kick represents a welcome freedom from what they see as the draconian rules and corporate greed on Twitch, which is more closely moderated and in recent years has taken a greater cut of its streamers’ earnings. To others, Kick allows harmful views to thrive.

Kick has faced the same scrutiny as other fledgling social media sites, forcing it to get serious about what kind of content it does and does not allow. A further crackdown on pornography, for instance, was imposed after Ross’ stream this spring. Other features, like a report button, were added only recently, and critics have said the site remains lax about enforcing restrictions.

“I think people are realizing the more controversial they are, the more shock factor involved in their content, the more viewers they get, and it can sometimes be a dangerous mix in that regard,” Kick CEO Ed Craven, 28, said in an interview. “So we are very quickly having to adapt what we consider to be aboveboard and where we have to say ‘no.’”

The question is: Does Kick actually want to shed its irreverent image, or is it merely paying lip service to regulation in the face of public pressure?

Place Your Bets

Craven quickly rose in the Australian technology world as the co-founder of Easygo and other online gambling companies he started with Bijan Tehrani.

Stake, which Craven started in 2017 out of Curaçao, is one of the world’s largest crypto casinos — sites where people can use various cryptocurrencies to gamble on games like blackjack and slots.

Last year, Stake’s success landed Craven near the top of The Australia Financial Review’s Young Rich List, which proclaimed him Australia’s “youngest ever self-made billionaire.” This year, the site estimated his wealth was $3.11 billion.

During a video interview in October, Craven wore AirPods and a dark T-shirt, his uniform of choice. He was part casual, relaxed broadcaster, part serious executive. Craven said he himself was an “avid livestreamer” who frequented Justin.tv, the early version of Twitch, when he was a teenager. He often donates money to Kick streamers — which makes up a not-insignificant amount of some streamers’ earnings — while watching their broadcasts the same way any other fan might.

“Pretty much everyone heavily involved with Kick has grown up with livestreaming,” he said. “It’s been a large part of our lives over the last decade or so.”

The idea for Kick originated, at least in part, from Stake’s promotional efforts.

In 2021, Stake began offering star Twitch streamers like Félix Lengyel, known as xQc, and Tyler Niknam, aka Trainwreck, contracts of more than $1 million a month to broadcast themselves gambling on its site — sometimes also providing the funds the streamers were using — leading to a surge of interest in gambling content on Twitch. When Drake announced a partnership with Stake the next year and began betting hundreds of thousands of dollars while streaming on a Twitch channel called StakeDrake, it only added to the mania.

Twitch’s advertisers didn’t like it, so the company last year banned the streaming of online slots and other games on sites that were unlicensed in the United States or other countries that have consumer protections, a list that included Stake.com. It said it did so to prevent “predatory behavior.” Twitch said gambling viewership on its site had dropped 75% since then.

The next month, Niknam, Tehrani and Craven started Kick, which has 195 employees based in Australia, Serbia and the United States.

Streamers have flocked to the site; Kick said that it had 158,510 active streamers in October, and that viewership has climbed to 104 million hours in October from 12.5 million hours watched at the beginning of the year. Some Kick streamers say they have seen better growth and earnings than on rival sites like YouTube or Twitch.

Andrei Zanescu, an assistant professor at Concordia University in Canada who is the co-author of a forthcoming book about Twitch, said it was unsurprising that Kick was offering such generous terms to its creators, because Stake was probably seeing an influx of traffic as Kick streamers broadcast themselves gambling on Stake.

Slot machine livestreams and gambling advertisements for Stake are commonplace on Kick, and the 54.8 million hours of gambling content that viewers watched in the third quarter of this year made up nearly 20% of total Kick content, according to the data firm Streams Charts.

Kick “can absolutely afford to run at a loss as long as it takes, as long as overall the business venture is generating profit for them,” Zanescu added.

But Craven said that was not the goal. He acknowledged that Kick, which is losing money, offered “marketing value” for Stake and that the two sites had some of the same shareholders, but said that they were “completely separate entities” with distinct management and operations teams.

An Unruly Mix

Kick’s homepage is typically an overwhelming swirl of youthful testosterone.

Recently, several thousand people watched Nick Kolcheff, who goes by Nickmercs, shoot at cartoon enemies in Apex Legends, a battle royale game. Other viewers watched a British livestreamer named Sam Pepper walk down a street in Brazil, commenting on his interactions with street vendors and making lewd comments about the women who popped up on his broadcast.

Some streamers chatted with their viewers as they watched slot machine reels spin in the background on Stake and other gambling sites. As AverageGuy, a British streamer, watched his slot machine spin, one commenter wrote: “No moral compass showcasing this to younger viewers.”

The streamer pointed out that people had to click a button affirming they were at least 18 to watch his stream — one safeguard Kick has put into effect to guard against influencing underage viewers to gamble, though it relies on an honor system. “I’m quite happy to educate people,” AverageGuy said, calling the critic a “moron.”

Online gambling is heavily regulated in the United States and illegal in many states, though it can be possible to evade regional restrictions through virtual private networks that mask a user’s location. A representative for Craven said that even users with VPNs were unable to gamble on Stake in the United States because the site checks people’s photo identifications as an additional safeguard. (A recent lawsuit accusing the company’s founders of stealing the idea for the site claimed that Stake was aware of and encouraged efforts by Americans to gamble using VPNs. The lawsuit was dismissed over jurisdictional issues.)

To dodge U.S. restrictions, American streamers who broadcast themselves gambling have typically done so while outside the country. Though sports betting has proliferated after a 2018 Supreme Court decision, online gambling remains illegal in many states, particularly for users under 18, who are considered more likely to become addicted if exposed to gambling early.

But in recent years, a “parallel ecosystem” of sites and products that are less regulated have sprung up, said Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, an advocacy group. Such products include loot boxes in video games, online slot machines that offer some free chips and websites that advertise or direct users to gambling sites, like Kick.

“These are very deliberate schemes to get around gambling laws and to be able to profit on youth gambling,” Whyte said. “We think it’s extremely predatory.”

Craven said Kick had “strong trust and safety controls” to block children and people in places where laws barred residents from accessing gambling content.

Dealing with a global patchwork of regulations had been an unexpectedly large obstacle, Craven said. In June, Kick was blocked by internet service providers in Greece for its gambling content.

He said that Kick resolved its issues in October with Greece’s regulatory body and that the country’s internet service providers would remove Kick from their blacklists in the coming weeks.

Competitors

The big names have set up shop on Kick. Lengyel drew headlines when he signed a two-year contract with Kick worth up to $100 million. Kaitlyn Siragusa, known as Amouranth, one of the most popular women on Twitch with 6.4 million followers; Kolcheff, who has 6.7 million followers; and chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who has 1.9 million Twitch followers, have also signed lucrative Kick deals.

Kick’s pilfering of creators — some of whom also still broadcast on Twitch — has put pressure on Twitch to improve its relationship with streamers. But Kick is still dwarfed by Twitch, which averages 35 million daily viewers and 7 million streamers who go live each month. And despite Kick’s more favorable revenue split, Twitch offers more ways to earn money, including a cut of advertising dollars.

“As of right now, Kick isn’t the most brand-friendly platform, so if you want to do deals, you need to still be active on other platforms,” said Mike Lee, the head of gaming talent at United Talent Agency, citing some of Kick’s questionable content.

In its community guidelines, updated in October, Kick warns viewers that the site can get “rowdy” and that some of its streamers may not be for everyone.

“We value the importance of constructive dialogue over knee-jerk reactions often associated with ‘cancel culture,’” the site says. “Still, we also firmly recognize that free speech should not be a shield for hate speech.”

Some of Kick’s edgier livestreams have generated publicity and more viewership for the platform, such as when Ross advertised an forthcoming interview, alongside Tate, with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The guest turned out to be a Kim impersonator, but the stream still drew 330,000 viewers. (Ross did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other streams have landed the site in hot water. A tipping point came in September, when a pair of streamers, Paul Denino and Pepper, paid a man in Australia to hire an escort for a sexual encounter, which Denino then livestreamed on his Kick channel. When the woman realized the two livestreamers were watching the broadcast from another room in the apartment, she walked out. Denino and Pepper were detained by the police, then released without being charged. The police said “no offenses had been committed.”

Pepper did not respond to a request for comment. Denino said the police action was the result of a viewer of the livestream making false claims to the police about him, and was unrelated to the situation with the escort.

Craven, the CEO, left several laughing emojis in the chat tool accompanying the livestream as the action was unfolding, and even donated $500 to Denino during the broadcast, according to screenshots and video clips of the stream.

The incident prompted a flood of social media criticism, and some creators said they were considering leaving the platform. In response, Kick updated its community guidelines and added a button allowing its users to report inappropriate behavior.

Craven said that he regretted the situation, and that he and Kick were still learning. He said he didn’t want Kick to be known solely for “edgy content,” and said the site had established new guidelines on whether staff members should be present in the chat during “high risk” livestreams.

Nakamura, the chess player, said he saw Kick going through the same growing pains as other social media platforms in their early days — including Twitch.

“Twitch, when it started, was very much the Wild West,” he said. Of Kick, he said: “They’re trying to clean up certain parts of it. At the end of the day, it takes time.”

Still, efforts by other competitors to break into the livestreaming industry have petered out. Mixer, a livestreaming service purchased by Microsoft in 2016, signed top creators like Ninja and generated headlines for a few years before shutting down in 2020 after failing to compete with YouTube, Twitch or Facebook Gaming.

At TwitchCon, the company’s annual gathering where fans interact with the site’s content creators — held in Las Vegas this year — Twitch executives said they were unbothered by Kick’s meteoric rise.

Dan Clancy, Twitch’s chief executive and a former Google executive, said he was focused on growing the livestreaming industry as a whole, and wasn’t worried about where streamers chose to broadcast. He said he had learned a phrase at Google that was applicable: “Focus on growing the pie, don’t focus on your slice of the pie.”

As Clancy walked down the Vegas Strip one evening of TwitchCon, a streamer broadcasting on Kick beckoned him onto his video. “I got some bad news,” the streamer told him. “We’re live on Kick.”

“Hey, that’s your choice, you know?” Clancy replied. “Whatever you decide.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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The group worked in SL1001, a bland building with a blue glass facade betraying no sign that dozens of lawyers inside were toiling to protect the interests of one of the world’s most influential companies. For weeks they had been prepping for a meeting of powerful executives to discuss the safety of Google’s products. The deck was done. But that afternoon Walker told his team the agenda had changed, and they would have to spend the next few days preparing new slides and graphs.

In fact, the entire agenda of the company had changed — all in nine days. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, had decided to ready a slate of products based on artificial intelligence — immediately. He turned to Walker, the same lawyer he was trusting to defend the company in a profit-threatening antitrust case in Washington, D.C. Walker knew he would need to persuade the Advanced Technology Review Council, as Google called the group of executives, to throw off their customary caution and do as they were told.

It was an edict, and edicts didn’t happen very often at Google. But Google was staring at a real crisis. Its business model was potentially at risk.

What had set off Pichai and the rest of Silicon Valley was ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence program that had been released on Nov. 30, 2022, by an upstart called OpenAI. It had captured the imagination of millions of people who had thought AI was science fiction until they started playing with the thing. It was a sensation. It was also a problem.

Google had been developing its own AI technology that did many of the same things. Pichai was focused on ChatGPT’s flaws — that it got stuff wrong, that sometimes it turned into a biased pig. What amazed him was that OpenAI had gone ahead and released it anyway, and that consumers loved it. If OpenAI could do that, why couldn’t Google?

For tech company bosses, the decision of when and how to turn AI into a (hopefully) profitable business was a more simple risk-reward calculus. But to win, you had to have a product.

By Monday morning, Dec. 12, the team at SL1001 had a new agenda with a deck labeled “Privileged and Confidential/Need to Know.” Most attendees tuned in over videoconference. Walker started the meeting by announcing that Google was moving ahead with a chatbot and AI capabilities that would be added to cloud, search and other products.

“What are your concerns? Let’s get in line,” Walker said, according to Jen Gennai, the director of responsible innovation.

Eventually a compromise was reached. They would limit the rollout, Gennai said. And they would avoid calling anything a product. For Google, it would be an experiment. That way it didn’t have to be perfect. (A Google spokesperson said the ATRC did not have the power to decide how the products would be released.)

What played out at Google was repeated at other tech giants after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. They all had technology in various stages of development that relied on neural networks — AI systems that recognized sounds, generated images and chatted like a human. That technology had been pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton, an academic who had worked briefly with Microsoft and was now at Google. But the tech companies had been slowed by fears of rogue chatbots, and economic and legal mayhem.

Once ChatGPT was unleashed, none of that mattered as much, according to interviews with more than 80 executives and researchers, as well as corporate documents and audio recordings. The instinct to be first or biggest or richest — or all three — took over. The leaders of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies set a new course and pulled their employees along with them.

Over 12 months, Silicon Valley was transformed. Turning artificial intelligence into actual products that individuals and companies could use became the priority. Worries about safety and whether machines would turn on their creators were not ignored, but they were shunted aside — at least for the moment.

“Speed is even more important than ever,” Sam Schillace, a top executive, wrote Microsoft employees. It would be, he added, an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”

The strange thing was that the leaders of OpenAI never thought ChatGPT would shake up Silicon Valley. In early November 2022, a few weeks before it was released to the world, it didn’t really exist as a product. Most of the 375 employees working in their new offices, a former mayonnaise factory, were focused on a more powerful version of technology, called GPT-4, that could answer almost any question using information gleaned from an enormous collection of data scraped from seemingly everywhere.

In mid-November 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Greg Brockman, its president; and others met in a top-floor conference room to discuss the problems with their breakthrough tech yet again. Suddenly Altman made the decision — they would release the old, less-powerful technology.

On Nov. 29, the night before the launch, Brockman hosted drinks for the team. He didn’t think ChatGPT would attract a lot of attention, he said. His prediction: “no more than one tweet thread with 5k likes.”

Brockman was wrong. On the morning of Nov. 30, Altman tweeted about OpenAI’s new product, and the company posted a jargon-heavy blog item. And then, ChatGPT took off. Almost immediately, sign-ups overwhelmed the company’s servers. Engineers rushed in and out of a messy space near the office kitchen, huddling over laptops to pull computing power from other projects. In five days, more than 1 million people had used ChatGPT. Within a few weeks, that number would top 100 million. Though nobody was quite sure why, it was a hit. Network news programs tried to explain how it worked. A late-night comedy show even used it to write (sort of funny) jokes.

Mark Zuckerberg’s head was elsewhere. He had spent the entire year reorienting the company around the metaverse and was focused on virtual and augmented reality.

But ChatGPT would demand his attention. His top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, arrived in the Bay Area from New York about six weeks later for a routine management meeting at Meta, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

In Paris, LeCun’s scientists had developed an AI-powered bot that they wanted to release as open-source technology. Open source meant that anyone could tinker with its code. They called it Genesis. But when they sought permission to release it, Meta’s legal and policy teams pushed back, according to five people familiar with the discussion.

Caution versus speed was furiously debated among the executive team in early 2023 as Zuckerberg considered Meta’s course in the wake of ChatGPT.

Zuckerberg wanted to push out a project fast. Genesis was changed to LLaMA, short for “Large Language Model Meta AI,” and released to 4,000 researchers outside the company. Soon Meta received over 100,000 requests for access to the code.

But within days of LLaMA’s release, someone put the code on 4chan, the fringe online message board. Meta had lost control of its chatbot, raising the possibility that the worst fears of its legal and policy teams would come true. Researchers at Stanford University showed that the Meta system could easily do things like generate racist material.

On June 6, Zuckerberg received a letter about LLaMA from Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard Blumental, D-Conn. “Hawley and Blumental demand answers from Meta,” said a news release.

The letter called Meta’s approach risky and vulnerable to abuse and compared it unfavorably with ChatGPT. Why, the senators seemed to want to know, couldn’t Meta be more like OpenAI?

At the end of the summer of 2022, Microsoft’s offices weren’t yet back to their pre-pandemic bustle. But on Sept. 13, Satya Nadella summoned his top executives to a meeting at Building 34, Microsoft’s executive nerve center. It was two months before Altman made the decision to release ChatGPT.

Nadella took the lectern to tell his lieutenants that everything was about to change. This was an executive order from a leader who typically favored consensus. “We are pivoting the whole company on this technology,” Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist, later remembered him saying. “This is a central advancement in the history of computing, and we are going to be on that wave at the front of it.”

It all had to stay secret for the time being. Three “tented projects” were set up in early October to get the big pivot started. They were devoted to cybersecurity, the Bing search engine, Microsoft Word and related software.

Microsoft invited journalists to its Redmond, Washington, campus on Feb. 7 to introduce a chatbot in Bing to the world. They were instructed not to tell anybody they were going to a Microsoft event, and the topic wasn’t disclosed.

But somehow, Google found out. On Feb. 6, to get out ahead of Microsoft, it put up a blog post by Pichai announcing that Google would be introducing its own chatbot, Bard. It didn’t say exactly when.

By the morning of Feb. 8, the day after Microsoft announced the chatbot, its shares were up 5%. But for Google, the rushed announcement became an embarrassment. Researchers spotted errors in Google’s blog post. An accompanying GIF simulated Bard saying that the Webb telescope had captured the first pictures of an exoplanet, a planet outside the solar system. In fact, a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile got the first image of an exoplanet in 2004. Bard had gotten it wrong, and Google was ribbed in the news media and on social media.

It was, as Pichai later said in an interview, “unfortunate.” Google’s stock dropped almost 8%, wiping out more than $100 billion in value.

Hinton, Google’s best-known scientist, had always poked fun at doomers, rationalists and effective altruists who worried that AI would end humankind in the near future. He had developed much of the science behind artificial intelligence as a professor at the University of Toronto and became a wealthy man after joining Google in 2013. He is often called the godfather of AI.

But the new chatbots changed everything for him. The science had moved more quickly than he had expected. Microsoft’s introduction of its chatbot convinced him that Google would have no choice but to try to catch up. And the corporate race shaping up between tech giants seemed dangerous.

“If you think of Google as a company whose aim is to make profits,” Hinton said in April, “they can’t just let Bing take over from Google search. They’ve got to compete with that. When Microsoft decided to release a chatbot as the interface for Bing, that was the end of the holiday period.”

For the first time in more than 50 years, he stepped away from research. And then in April, he called Pichai and said goodbye.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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LONDON (AP) — The generative AI boom has sent governments worldwide scrambling to regulate the emerging technology, but it also has raised the risk of upending a European Union push to approve the world’s first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules.

The 27-nation bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act has been hailed as a pioneering rulebook. But with time running out, it’s uncertain if the EU’s three branches of government can thrash out a deal Wednesday in what officials hope is a final round of closed-door talks.

Europe’s yearslong efforts to draw up AI guardrails have been bogged down by the recent emergence of generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have dazzled the world with their ability to produce human-like work but raised fears about the risks they pose.

Those concerns have driven the U.S., U.K., China and global coalitions like the Group of 7 major democracies into the race to regulate the rapidly developing technology, though they’re still catching up to Europe.

Besides regulating generative AI, EU negotiators need to resolve a long list of other thorny issues, such as a full ban on police use of facial recognition systems, which have stirred privacy concerns.

Chances of clinching a political agreement between EU lawmakers, representatives from member states and executive commissioners “are pretty high partly because all the negotiators want a political win” on a flagship legislative effort, said Kris Shrishak, a senior fellow specializing in AI governance at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

“But the issues on the table are significant and critical, so we can’t rule out the possibility of not finding a deal,” he said.

Some 85% of the technical wording in the bill already has been agreed on, Carme Artigas, AI and digitalization minister for Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said at a press briefing Tuesday in Brussels.

If a deal isn’t reached in the latest round of talks, starting Wednesday afternoon and expected to run late into the night, negotiators will be forced to pick it up next year. That raises the odds the legislation could get delayed until after EU-wide elections in June — or go in a different direction as new leaders take office.

One of the major sticking points is foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

Also known as large language models, these systems are trained on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the internet. They give generative AI systems the ability to create something new, unlike traditional AI, which processes data and completes tasks using predetermined rules.

The AI Act was intended as product safety legislation, like similar EU regulations for cosmetics, cars and toys. It would grade AI uses according to four levels of risk — from minimal or no risk posed by video games and spam filters to unacceptable risk from social scoring systems that judge people based on their behavior.

The new wave of general purpose AI systems released since the legislation’s first draft in 2021 spurred European lawmakers to beef up the proposal to cover foundation models.

Researchers have warned that powerful foundation models, built by a handful of big tech companies, could be used to supercharge online disinformation and manipulation, cyberattacks or creation of bioweapons. They act as basic structures for software developers building AI-powered services so that “if these models are rotten, whatever is built on top will also be rotten — and deployers won’t be able to fix it,” said Avaaz, a nonprofit advocacy group.

France, Germany and Italy have resisted the update to the legislation and are calling instead for self-regulation — a change of heart seen as a bid to help homegrown generative AI players, such as French startup Mistral AI and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, compete with big U.S. tech companies like OpenAI.

Brando Benifei, an Italian member of the European Parliament who is co-leading the body’s negotiating efforts, was optimistic about resolving differences with member states.

There’s been “some movement” on foundation models, though there are “more issues on finding an agreement” on facial recognition systems, he said.

___

AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.

But since 2017, iPhone repairs have been a minefield. New batteries can trigger warning messages, replacement screens can disable a phone’s brightness settings, and substitute selfie cameras can malfunction.

The breakdowns are an outgrowth of Apple’s practice of writing software that gives it control over iPhones even after someone has bought one. Unlike cars, which can be repaired with generic parts by auto shops and do-it-yourself mechanics, new iPhones are coded to recognize the serial numbers for original components and may malfunction if the parts are changed.

This year, seven iPhone parts can trigger issues during repairs, up from three in 2017, when the company introduced a facial recognition system to unlock the device, according to iFixit, a company that analyzes iPhone components and sells parts for do-it-yourself repairs. The rate at which parts can cause breakdowns has been rising about 20% a year since 2016, when only one repair caused a problem.

In a series of tests, iFixit determines which parts cause issues when swapped between working iPhones of the same model. The results reveal that the number of malfunctions has increased with later iPhone generations.

The software phenomenon, which is known as parts pairing, has encouraged Apple customers to turn to its stores or authorized repair centers, which charge higher prices for parts and labor. In recent years, only approved parts and sanctioned repairs have avoided the problems. Replacing a shattered screen typically costs nearly $300, about $100 more than work done by an independent shop using a third-party screen.

To put it another way: The cost of replacing a cracked screen on a year-old iPhone 14 is nearly equivalent to the phone’s value, which Apple appraises at $430 in trade-in credit.

Apple’s grip on the repairs creates an incentive for customers to spend up to $200 on device insurance, known as AppleCare, which provides free battery replacements and screen repairs. Apple collects an estimated $9 billion annually for the service.

It has also spurred questions about Apple’s commitment to sustainability, with independent repair advocates saying the company could more effectively meet its goals of reducing carbon emissions by lowering repair costs to encourage people to maintain devices rather than buy new ones.

An Apple spokesperson said the company supported a customer’s right to repair a device and had created a self-service repair program to help. “We have been innovating to offer our customers the best choice and options when their product needs service,” he said.

State lawmakers from New York to California have responded with laws that aim to make repairs easier. The Biden administration has encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to advance rules that would stop smartphone makers from restricting independent repairs. But most of the regulations don’t include explicit restrictions on parts pairing.

Using software to control repairs has become commonplace across electronics, appliances and heavy machinery as faster chips and cheaper memory turn everyday products into miniature computers. HP has used a similar practice to encourage people to buy its ink cartridges over lower-priced alternatives. Tesla has incorporated it into many cars. And John Deere has put it in farm equipment, disabling machines that aren’t fixed by company repair workers.

Apple and other companies have defended the practice by saying it protects customers’ safety and the company’s brand. Shoddy parts, like a faulty face scanner, could compromise the phone’s security, and if an independent shop messes up a repair, the customer often blames Apple instead of the shop, the company has said. The practice also allows Apple to create a record of parts in the device, which can be helpful to buyers of secondhand phones.

But the increase of pairing parts with software has animated a movement that wants to make repairs cheaper and easier. Proponents, which include iFixit, say it would be better for the environment and customers’ wallets to extend the life of devices. They have urged lawmakers to simplify repairs, asking: “Who owns the device after it’s been purchased? The customer or the manufacturer?”

“You basically have to ask permission before doing a repair,” said Nathan Proctor, who has lobbied states for repair legislation on behalf of U.S. PIRG, a nonprofit largely funded by small donors.

When Apple expanded its software limits in 2017, it upended repair businesses. Shakeel Taiyab said iPhone repairs at his independent shop in south San Francisco had decreased about 15% this year. Some customers with issues like cracked screens keep using the phones because they find repairing or replacing it unaffordable.

Free Geek, a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, that donates repaired computers and smartphones to underprivileged people, decided that Apple’s software made iPhones too difficult to service, said Amber Brink, Free Geek’s director of technology.

Last year, Free Geek received thousands of donated iPhones but repurposed only 280, Brink said. “It’s a headache,” she added.

Consumers who opt against paying top dollar for an Apple-authorized repair may suffer the consequences. In February, after Gio Grimaldi, a 15-year-old in New Hampshire, shattered the screen of his iPhone SE on a snowboarding trip, he took it to a nearby repair shop.

He said the closest Apple Store was 90 minutes away and had quoted $130 for replacing the screen — 40% higher than the independent store. When he took the phone home, it worked fine but was lacking True Tone, a software feature that adjusts the screen’s brightness and color to match the ambient lighting.

“That’s just plain stupid,” he said. “I always love Apple as a company, but they’re really stuck up about third-party repairs.”

Over the past year, New York, Minnesota and California passed bills requiring that electronics manufacturers provide parts, tools and manuals to third parties.

After years of lobbying against such rules, Apple signed on to support California’s law and honor it across the United States. It has also encouraged the federal government to adopt similar rules, said Brian Naumann, the head of Apple’s repair service efforts, who spoke about the right to repairs during a White House event last month.

“Apple has taken significant steps to expand options for consumers to repair their devices, which we know is good for consumers’ budgets and good for the environment,” Naumann said.

But the California legislation failed to directly address Apple’s practice of using software to control the repair process. In Oregon, state Sen. Janeen Sollman, a Democrat representing an area outside Portland, is part of a group of lawmakers aiming to pass a state law that would prohibit Apple and others from having restrictions on repairs.

As the Oregon legislation has progressed, Apple has encouraged lawmakers to scale it back. Apple paid for a half dozen legislators to visit its Silicon Valley headquarters this year, and tried to impress on them how important security and safety were to repairs, Sollman said.

She left California unpersuaded. “I said, ‘You’re making it more accessible, but it’s not a true right to repair if you have ultimate control,’” Sollman said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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“Get Ready with Me” videos are everywhere these days, and they’re as straightforward as the name suggests. Social media users, often influencers, invite viewers to watch them get ready to do something or go somewhere. And embedded in the storyline are the skin care, the makeup, the hairdo and all the glam that goes into looking hot — and, of course, the personal stories about life or love that arrest your attention.

GRWM videos, as they’re also known, are part of a trend of “with me” content that has gained popularity over the past decade. Think “Clean with Me” videos where users watch people clean their homes for inspiration or pleasure. Or hours-long “Study with Me” videos for students who want buddies for intense cramming sessions but don’t have any friends nearby.

More than a decade after debuting on YouTube in the days when creator content was still relatively new, “Get Ready with Me” videos and their personal sensibilities have inundated social media thanks to a shorter iteration of the genre, which seems to have lent them a more personal and even revelatory tone.

“For creators, this is a vehicle for storytelling,” says Earnest Pettie, a trends insight lead at YouTube. “It becomes an excuse to share something about your life.”

The videos have made everyday tasks a core staple of our online diets on platforms like YouTube by drawing in viewers who find it either informative, communal, or both.

Consumers, for the most part, seem to be really into it. In a report released in August, YouTube said there were more than 6 billion views of videos titled with variations of “grwm” at that point in the year. On TikTok, videos with the hashtag “grwm” have been viewed more than 157 billion times.

Celebrities and “it girls” have hopped on the bandwagon, often to promote their brands or as part of Vogue’s “Beauty Secrets” series, which draws from the trend. In April, model Sofia Richie Grainge joined TikTok and posted a series of Get Ready with Me videos to offer fans an inside look into her wedding.

In the initial years of the genre, Pettie says, people would simply put on makeup in front of the camera. Soon after, the videos evolved to what is seen today — content creators getting glammed up while talking to their followers about whatever’s on their minds.

It experienced another revival in recent years with the popularity of short-form video, TikTok’s bread-and-butter — which was cloned by YouTube and Instagram in the form of Shorts and Reels, respectively.

The genre is being adopted by up-and-coming creators who might be uncomfortable sharing a story in a video without doing anything else, says Nicla Bartoli, the vice president of sales at Influencer Marketing Factory. Adding activities has the tendency to make content feel less heavy and more inviting, especially to viewers who’ve never come across the creator but are interested in what they’re doing.

Because users also tend to scroll quickly on TikTok, creators must capture a viewer’s attention right away before they move on to the next thing on their “For You” page. More engagement means more popularity, which typically leads to partnerships with companies eager to pay influencers through brand deals or other means.

“The level of compelling stories has been increasing a lot,” says Bartoli, whose company connects influencers with brands who want to partner with them to promote products. “It can be because it’s more crowded. You need to step up the game, so to speak.”

One of the most-known influencers in this arena is 22-year-old Alix Earle, who shares her experiences with struggles like acne, an eating disorder and panic attacks as well as lighthearted episodes about nights out with friends. She has nearly 6 million followers on TikTok.

Alisha Rei, 18, who lives in Toronto and models, says she wants to create viral social media content to help her build her following and, in turn, her modeling career. She says her friends told her to make Get Ready with Me videos because they tend to be popular.

Because of modeling events, Rei says she’d missed some shifts at her part-time job working at a mall shoe store. So she decided to make a “get ready with me to get fired” video while doing her makeup before she went back for another shift. The video was tagged #pleasedontbelikeme.

In an interview, Rei, a college freshman, says she received a warning from her manager but didn’t get fired. “God is good,” she says.

Often, behind the “getting ready” content lurk other, more commercial messages.

Bartoli notes that many of the confessional videos do more than they might first appear: They can provide more engagement from users who want to receive updates on a story that’s being shared or know more about the products creators are using. That can make the videos good for product placements and encourage brand partnerships, which, according to Goldman Sachs, is the largest source of income for creators. The investment bank said in a report earlier this year that the creator economy is worth $250 billion today and could roughly double in size by 2027.

Allie Pribula, a 25-year-old TikToker who used to be an elementary school teacher in the Philadelphia suburbs, says she started making GRWM videos as a way to process her feelings about her old job. Pribula says some companies have since reached out to her to offer gifts and have paid her to market products on her page. She says she considers it a “side hustle.”

Camilla Ramirez Diaz, a 25-year-old optician who lives in Burlingame, California, recently bought a freckle pen that was featured on GRWM videos she watches at night to wind down her day. Diaz prefers to watch them more on TikTok, where she says the content can be a bit more personal. She cites a video she recently came across from an influencer who was getting ready while stranded in London due to an expired passport.

“Its almost like you’re watching your friend on FaceTime with you,” Diaz says. “I could sit there all day and watch Get Ready with Me videos from different creators. They’re just a mix of everything.”

___

Haleluya Hadero writes about Amazon, retail and internet culture for The Associated Press. Follow her work at https://apnews.com/author/haleluya-hadero

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NEW YORK — When Ana Kirova first heard the idea that she should become chief executive of Feeld, the dating app, she was “terrified.”

It was 2021, and Kirova had been working at the company for five years. The suggestion came from Dimo Trifonov, the app’s founder and Kirova’s romantic partner. Kirova had a strong hand in Feeld’s transformation from a niche app to something closer to mainstream. Still, she wondered if it would be smarter to hire someone from the outside.

Over dinner at Seamore’s, a restaurant in Brooklyn, Kirova, 31, speculated that her hesitation to accept the job was rooted in insecurities that might be tied to her gender.

“The more I thought about it, the more it felt like if I were a guy, I would just take it and try,” she said.

She decided to accept the role. “There’s no such thing as a good CEO that is just born that way, that falls out of the sky,” she said.

Feeld, which started as a dating app for couples and singles called 3nder in 2014, has, under Kirova’s leadership, positioned itself as a go-to for nonmonogamous, sex-positive and kinky people of all sexual orientations.

It’s also acquired a reputation as a space that fosters directness, something of a rarity in the dating app world.

Amanda Miller, a professor of sociology at the University of Indianapolis, said Feeld marketed itself as a place to “find your human(s).” “That’s kind of a signal to the user of what types of folks they’re attracting and what types of folks wouldn’t be interested in joining,” Miller said.

Half of Feeld’s users in the United States identify as something other than heterosexual, according to the company. There are at least 20 other classification options on Feeld, including GrayA, for those who rarely experience sexual attraction, and objectumsexual, for those who have sexual or romantic feelings toward inanimate objects. Choice also abounds when it comes to gender (nonbinary and genderfluid are among the 18 options) and desires (texting, threesomes, watching, foreplay, friendships, bondage and 20 more).

Today, the company, which had about a dozen or fewer employees for many years, has nearly 100, with about one-third of those hired this year.

Since receiving $500,000 from an angel investor in 2016, Feeld says that it has remained profitable without any additional external support. Since 2015, it has offered subscription memberships that come with various benefits, like the ability to know when someone was last seen on Feeld and to filter other users by their desires. (Memberships are sold at different price points, depending on length. For example, 30 days costs $24.99.) Recently, Feeld also made the leap to IRL, hosting 31 in-person socials worldwide this year, with about 200 attendees at each.

Feeld would not share how many active users it has or how many times the app has been downloaded. It has about 60,000 reviews in Apple’s app store, while Bumble, founded the same year as Feeld, has 1.4 million, Hinge has 763,000 and Grindr has 295,000. From 2021 to 2022, average weekly active users on Feeld grew by 90%, and the app is on track for 65% growth in weekly active users this year, according to the company.

For years, dating app companies prioritized user growth, but more recently, the industry has shifted its focus to monetization, according to a report from Morgan Stanley. In that regard, Feeld is doing “exceedingly well,” said Lexi Sydow, head of insights at data.ai, a mobile data and analytics provider. Sydow said the amount consumers spent on subscriptions and one-off purchases to Feeld grew by 107% between the first three quarters of 2022 and 2023.

And the app may have a certain baked-in advantage to keeping users subscribing.

“Feeld is not necessarily about finding someone to marry,” Sydow said. “It’s not like Hinge, which is ‘designed to be deleted,’” as that company put it in an advertising campaign. “This bodes well for monetization.”

Still, Sydow emphasized that Feeld was a small player in the market compared with behemoths like Bumble, Tinder, Grindr and Hinge — data.ai estimates that Feeld’s share of global spending on dating apps is about 1%.

An Eye-Opening Move

Though Kirova is not an official founder of Feeld, she has been involved in the app from the beginning, when she inspired its formation.

Kirova, who now lives in Portugal, was born in Bulgaria shortly after the collapse of the country’s communist regime. After high school, she entered a graphic design program at the University of Greenwich in London. There, at age 21, she met Trifonov, a fellow Bulgarian, who was then a 23-year-old 3D motion designer.

Soon after she and Trifonov began dating, Kirova fell for a woman. She assumed that would be the death knell for her budding relationship. Instead, Trifonov told her he wanted her to have the freedom to explore. The experience inspired him to build an app called 3nder (pronounced Thrinder) where couples and singles could date.

“It was received with a lot of judgment and ridicule,” Kirova said. GQ compared it to a “24/7 swingers party,” and VentureBeat gave “5 reasons your threesome will be way better if you don’t use this stupid app.” But the coverage attracted users.

After legal threats from Tinder in 2016, the app renamed itself Feeld. Kirova joined the company under the title of Zen Master, leading operations, and was later promoted to head of product.

Around 2017, a researcher at the company observed that many users said they had joined Feeld to go on a date with a couple but that as time went on, it became clear that they wanted to engage in a deeper form of self-exploration — for example, to find out what it felt like to date someone of the same sex.

The observation was a revelation for Kirova. She and Trifonov began to think about scaling up and out. Feeld started several major new features: paired profiles for couples to date together, new gender identity options and the ability to peruse profiles without making an immediate decision.

That last one stands in contrast to Tinder’s and Bumble’s famous swiping mechanism — left if the person the app offers is a “no,” right for a “yes.” Though this may seem like a minor difference in functionality, Kirova said it reflected a broader philosophy.

“A lot of apps have a yes or no because then you teach whatever algorithm that fuels this with a lot more certainty,” Kirova said. “But it’s a false certainty, because what I like right now … it’s like, ask me again in two days.”

She and Trifonov continue to be romantically involved. Kirova said working together was not as complicated as it might sound, and Trifonov, now the chairman, has stepped away from day-to-day operations.

“It can be stressful, but I’ve never known anything else,” Kirova said. “I’ve never been in such a long partnership with someone who isn’t also my business partner.”

In Search of Directness

Even Feeld users who aren’t seeking something unusual say they are drawn in by the clarity that is encouraged on the app.

Adara Bryan, 36, joined Feeld in June strictly for monogamous, nonkinky dating. Though she is “pretty vanilla,” she said, she had found that the communication around desires, needs and boundaries on Feeld was “far better than on any other app I’ve ever experienced.”

She added that most conversations started with questions about people’s reasons for being on Feeld. “On other apps, it’s coded,” she said. “On Feeld, it’s pretty clear what people are looking for.”

Sometimes that directness can cross the line into aggression or fetishization.

Leia Slosberg, 31, a technology project manager who downloaded Feeld in January, said that although she had generally found Feeld to be a safe space, she had dealt with men who “think they’re entitled to have sex with you by virtue of connecting with you.”

Kana Higuchi, 26, who has used Feeld since 2020, said her experiences with Feeld had helped her “awaken a part of my sexuality,” but she had noticed what for her was a red flag: that some people’s profiles specify an interest in young Asian women.

“People will ask me, ‘What’s your ethnicity?’” she said. “I say I’m Japanese, and immediately they’re like, ‘That’s so exotic’ or ‘That’s so hot.’ I guess because it’s a kink- and fetish-friendly app, there are people who are more likely to be forward about an identity-based fetish or kink, and that can feel wrong to me.”

Users also complain that the chat functions in the app are buggy, sending duplicate messages, taking a long time to load or delaying message delivery. Feeld said that it was aware of the issues users have had with the technology and that it was working to remedy them.

And some of the features meant to encourage transparency aren’t universally beloved: Ann Nguyen, 28, said she disliked the app’s read receipt feature.

“I’ve had people who unmatched with me because I looked at their messages and didn’t reply immediately,” she said. “I don’t like the increased sense of urgency.”

And then, of course, there’s the problem universal to dating apps.

“I can expect to get ghosted over 50% of the time, no matter what I do,” said Ben Bar, 34, a data manager who has been using Feeld for about 2 1/2 years. “It’s the cost of doing business.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods.

“Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do.

The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text.

“We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,” said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. “Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE?

Perlmutter directs the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 480,000 copyrights last year covering millions of individual works but is increasingly being asked to register works that are AI-generated. So far, copyright claims for fully machine-generated content have been soundly rejected because copyright laws are designed to protect works of human authorship.

But, Perlmutter asks, as humans feed content into AI systems and give instructions to influence what comes out, “is there a point at which there’s enough human involvement in controlling the expressive elements of the output that the human can be considered to have contributed authorship?”

That’s one question the Copyright Office has put to the public. A bigger one — the question that’s fielded thousands of comments from creative professions — is what to do about copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation.

More than 9,700 comments were sent to the Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, before an initial comment period closed in late October. Another round of comments is due by Dec. 6. After that, Perlmutter’s office will work to advise Congress and others on whether reforms are needed.

WHAT ARE ARTISTS SAYING?

Addressing the “Ladies and Gentlemen of the US Copyright Office,” the “Family Ties” actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman said she was disturbed that AI models were “ingesting 100 years of film” and TV in a way that could destroy the structure of the film business and replace large portions of its labor pipeline.

It “appears to many of us to be the largest copyright violation in the history of the United States,” Bateman wrote. “I sincerely hope you can stop this practice of thievery.”

Airing some of the same AI concerns that fueled this year’s Hollywood strikes, television showrunner Lilla Zuckerman (“Poker Face”) said her industry should declare war on what is “nothing more than a plagiarism machine” before Hollywood is “coopted by greedy and craven companies who want to take human talent out of entertainment.”

The music industry is also threatened, said Nashville-based country songwriter Marc Beeson, who’s penned tunes for Carrie Underwood and Garth Brooks. Beeson said AI has potential to do good but “in some ways, it’s like a gun — in the wrong hands, with no parameters in place for its use, it could do irreparable damage to one of the last true American art forms.”

While most commenters were individuals, their concerns were echoed by big music publishers (Universal Music Group called the way AI is trained “ravenous and poorly controlled”) as well as author groups and news organizations including the New York Times and The Associated Press.

IS IT FAIR USE?

What leading tech companies like Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are telling the Copyright Office is that their training of AI models fits into the “fair use” doctrine that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.

“The American AI industry is built in part on the understanding that the Copyright Act does not proscribe the use of copyrighted material to train Generative AI models,” says a letter from Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The purpose of AI training is to identify patterns “across a broad body of content,” not to “extract or reproduce” individual works, it added.

So far, courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should treat AI systems. In a defeat for visual artists, a federal judge in San Francisco last month dismissed much of the first big lawsuit against AI image-generators, though allowed some of the case to proceed.

Most tech companies cite as precedent Google’s success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors’ claim that Google’s digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

But that’s a flawed comparison, argued former law professor and bestselling romance author Heidi Bond, who writes under the pen name Courtney Milan. Bond said she agrees that “fair use encompasses the right to learn from books,” but Google Books obtained legitimate copies held by libraries and institutions, whereas many AI developers are scraping works of writing through “outright piracy.”

Perlmutter said this is what the Copyright Office is trying to help sort out.

“Certainly this differs in some respects from the Google situation,” Perlmutter said. “Whether it differs enough to rule out the fair use defense is the question in hand.”

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The buzzy announcement, made by Jeff Bezos on “60 Minutes” as part of a Cyber Monday promotional package, drew global attention. “I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not,” said Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the CEO at the time. The drones would be “ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” probably in 2015, the company said.

Eight additional years later, drone delivery is a reality — kind of — on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. That is a major achievement for a program that has waxed and waned over the years and lost many of its early leaders to newer and more urgent projects.

Yet the venture as it currently exists is so underwhelming that Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. If this is science fiction, it’s being played for laughs.

A decade is an eternity in technology, but even so, drone delivery does not approach the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between dazzling claims and mundane reality happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Self-driving cars, the metaverse, flying cars, robots, neighborhoods or even cities built from scratch, virtual universities that can compete with Harvard, artificial intelligence — the list of delayed and incomplete promises is long.

“Having ideas is easy,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of technology companies’ hype. “Turning them into reality is hard. Turning them into being deployed at scale is even harder.”

Amazon said in October that drone deliveries would expand to Britain, Italy and another, unidentified U.S. city by the end of 2024. Yet even on the threshold of growth, a question lingers: Now that the drones finally exist in at least limited form, why did we think we needed them in the first place?

Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in College Station’s drone zone. They are Amazon fans and place regular orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, even if the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s cool to have stuff literally land on your driveway, at least the first few times, there are many hurdles to getting stuff this way.

Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

The other active U.S. test site is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford site seemed largely moribund, with only three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it was delivering via drones in Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to come back to the site. It also arranged an interview with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who runs the drone program. The company later canceled both without explanation.

A corporate blog post on Oct. 18 said that drones had safely delivered “hundreds” of household items in College Station since December and that customers there could now have some medications delivered. Lockeford wasn’t mentioned.

After Silverman and Lord expressed initial interest in the drone program, Amazon offered $100 in gift certificates in October 2022 to follow through. But their service didn’t start until June, and then it was suspended during a punishing heat wave when the drones could not fly.

The incentives, however, kept coming. The couple got an email recently from Amazon pushing Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which usually costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies lasted. They ordered it, and a little while later, a drone dropped a big box containing a small jar. Amazon said “some promotional items” are being offered “as a welcome.”

“We don’t really need anything they offer for free,” said Silverman, a 51-year-old novelist and caregiver. “The drones feel more like a toy than anything — a toy that wastes a huge amount of paper and cardboard.”

The Texas weather plays havoc with important deliveries. Lord, a 54-year-old professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M, ordered a medication through the mail. By the time he retrieved the package, the drug had melted. He’s hopeful that the drones can eventually handle problems like this.

“I still view this program positively, knowing that it is in the experimental phase,” he said.

Amazon said the drones will improve over time. It announced a new model, the MK30, last year and released pictures in October. The MK30, which is slated to begin service by the end of 2024, was touted as having a greater range, an ability to fly in inclement weather and a 25% reduction in “perceived noise.”

When Amazon began working on drones years ago, the retailer took two or three days to ship many items to customers. It worried that it was vulnerable to potential competitors whose vendors were more local, including Google and eBay. Drones were all about speed.

“We can do half-hour delivery,” Bezos promised on “60 Minutes.”

For a while, drones were the next big thing. Google developed its own drone service, Wing, which now works with Walmart to deliver items in parts of Dallas and Frisco, Texas. Startups got funding; about $2.5 billion was invested between 2013 and 2019, according to the Teal Group, an aerospace consultancy. Veteran venture capitalist Tim Draper said in 2013 that “everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be handled by drones.” Uber Eats announced a food delivery drone in late 2019. The future was up in the air.

Amazon started thinking really long term. It envisioned and got a patent for a drone resupply vehicle that would hover in the sky at 45,000 feet. That’s above commercial airplanes, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver customers a hot dinner.

Yet on the ground, progress was slow — sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes because of the company’s corporate DNA. The same aggressive confidence that created a trillion-dollar business undermined Amazon’s efforts to work with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“The attitude was, ‘We’re Amazon. We’ll convince the FAA,’” said one former Amazon drone executive, who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak about the subject. “The FAA wants companies to come in with great humility and great transparency. That is not a strength of Amazon.”

A more complicated issue was getting the technology to the point where it was safe not just most of the time but all of the time. The first drone that lands on someone’s head or takes off clutching a cat sets the program back another decade, particularly if it is filmed.

“Part of the DNA of the tech industry is, you can accomplish things you never thought you could accomplish,” said Neil Woodward, who spent four years as a senior manager in Amazon’s drone program. “But the truth is, the laws of physics don’t change.”

Woodward, now retired, spent years at NASA in the astronaut program before moving to the private sector.

“When you work for the government, you have 535 people on your board of directors” — he was referring to Congress — “and a good chunk of them want to take your funding away because they have other priorities,” he said. “That makes government agencies very risk-averse. At Amazon, you’re given a lot of rope, but you can get out over your skis.”

In the end, there must be a market. As Woodward put it, using an old Silicon Valley cliché: “Do the dogs like the dog food? Sometimes the dogs don’t.”

Archie Conner, 82, lives a few doors down from Lord and Silverman. He sees the drones as less a retail innovation and more a marketing one.

“When you hear a drone, you naturally think about Amazon. It’s real out-of-the-box thinking, even if no one orders at all,” he said. “Drones were on the news just the other day. People say, ‘Wow, Amazon did that.’”

Conner also ordered the free Skippy peanut butter but forgot to put out the landing target, so the drone went away. Then he ordered it again. Meanwhile, an Amazon delivery person showed up with the first jar. So now he and his wife, Belinda, have two jars.

“We haven’t found much we really want to pay for,” Conner said. “But we have enjoyed the free peanut butter.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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What if I told you that it no longer had to be this way?

Your phone bill could shrink to as little as $25 a month if you picked a wireless plan from a lesser-known service provider known as a discount carrier. The cheaper plans, based on my tests, offer sufficiently fast internet speeds and reliable phone service. It takes some courage and technological know-how to make the switch, but the potential savings outweigh the downsides.

On the surface, these budget carriers, which include Cricket Wireless, Straight Talk, Boost Mobile, Mint Mobile and Visible, lack a cool factor. They do not operate their own cell networks; instead, they lease wireless services from the big carriers and market them toward retirees. The no-frill plans often have trade-offs, including slower download speeds, since Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers have priority access to faster network performance.

Yet in the past few years, so much has changed that I can now confidently recommend discount phone plans for most people, including white-collar professionals and Instagram-obsessed youths. Here’s why:

— Cellular networks have peaked. Newer 5G and 4G cell technology is so fast that even budget carriers can provide very fast download speeds — zippy enough to stream video, load maps and download apps — even if they are somewhat slower than what the Big Three provide.

— The shift to hybrid work. Office workers who used to spend more time commuting and had to rely on their cellular network now have their commute time cut in half and are relying more on the Wi-Fi connection at their home or office cubicle for making video calls and sending messages. That means slower cellular performance on a budget carrier may be unnoticeable.

— You can try a discount carrier without breaking up with your big carrier. The eSIM, the digital version of the SIM card that carries your phone number, is now common on many modern smartphones. It lets you immediately activate an extra phone line without needing to insert a physical SIM card, which makes experimenting with an off-brand wireless service easier and less intimidating.

Once you have converted to a discount phone plan, the savings add up quickly. A family of four buying new iPhones with a Cricket phone plan would spend $3,762 over two years, $1,311 less than they would spend with Verizon, according to an analysis by WalletHub, a personal finance research firm.

“The negative perception around budget plans is fading,” said Cassandra Happe, an analyst for WalletHub. “Now they’re seen as a smart choice for everyone. People are realizing you can get a great phone plan without spending a fortune.”

To put discount phone carriers to the test, I activated three services — Visible, Cricket and Straight Talk — on an iPhone. In various locations in California, I ran speed tests, made phone calls and used apps like maps, YouTube and TikTok. For comparisons, I ran the same tests on my Verizon connection.

The discount carriers were, on average, up to 46% slower than my Verizon connection. That sounds like a lot, but in real-world tests, I didn’t notice a difference — my apps worked fine, and videos streamed smoothly.

Here’s how the setup and testing process went.

Buying and activating a discount phone plan

Consumers can sign up for discount phone plans by buying a physical SIM card from a website or retail store, though I recommend eSIM as the way. The digital SIM card saves time — and because you can install multiple eSIMs at the same time, you can try a discount carrier and compare it with the performance of your big carrier before deciding on a plan.

The steps for setting up an eSIM vary somewhat from carrier to carrier, but the process is fundamentally consistent: You buy a phone plan through a brand’s website or app and click a button or scan a bar code to activate the service.

Visible charged $25 a month for a plan that included unlimited data; Straight Talk charged $35 a month for a plan with 10 gigabytes of high-speed internet; and Cricket charged $40 — $10 to activate the eSIM and $30 for a monthly plan that included 5 gigabytes of data.

Visible, which is owned by Verizon, had the smoothest setup. Its mobile app let me buy a phone plan using Apple Pay and tap a few buttons to activate service. With Straight Talk and Cricket, I perused the websites to find their eSIM offerings. I ran into problems with Cricket, which emailed a broken web link to activate my plan; it took me about 20 minutes to find a tool on its website to manually activate my service.

Test, test

My iPhone could hold up to eight eSIMs, so I installed all three plans and toggled among them for each test.

I drove to 10 locations, including hiking trails, shopping centers and wineries, in California. At each location, I used the Speedtest app to test each carrier’s internet speed, and I called my very patient wife and streamed video on apps like TikTok and YouTube.

Broadly speaking, the discount phone services performed fine. They were occasionally sluggish when loading videos on TikTok, but my Verizon connection had similar delays.

Based on the results measured with the Speedtest app, Cricket and Visible had comparable performances, with download speeds of 154 megabits per second, on average. Straight Talk delivered speeds of 279 megabits per second — similar to my Verizon connection, which delivered download speeds of 287 megabits per second.

What do those numbers mean? To stream video through apps like Netflix and Hulu, you need a minimum of 25 megabits per second, according to AT&T. So the budget carriers gave me more than enough speed to handle some of the most data-intensive tasks.

Taking the leap

Among the three discount carriers, my favorite was Visible because of its smooth setup process and consistent network performance. Visible was also more transparent with its billing in emailed receipts. Straight Talk never emailed me a receipt. I was turned off by Cricket’s clunky website and the $10 fee for activating an eSIM, which was not a charge the other two carriers required.

Angie Klein, president of the Verizon Value organization, which oversees Visible, said its budget plans were designed for tech-savvy customers who wanted a single line, and Verizon’s traditional wireless plans were a full-service experience with more perks. Straight Talk and Cricket did not respond to requests for comment.

On the whole, I don’t have a one-size-fits-all recommendation. As with the big carriers, cellular performance for each discount carrier will vary depending on the network’s coverage where you live and work.

But because eSIM technology makes it easy to switch to another network — and the discount phone plans are cheap — it would be foolish to pass on the opportunity to give a budget phone plan a try.

Last year, Robin Phillips, a 54-year-old Seattle resident who works in food distribution, broke up with Verizon to try Visible. He ran into hiccups. The wireless service initially would not activate, and the customer support agents, available only through a chat app, were unhelpful.

But he said he didn’t regret the switch. Visible’s service began working after a day, and he pays $25 a month, down from the $70 that he used to pay for a Verizon plan. His wife also converted.

“Is it worth it?” he said. “We’re saving about $1,000 a year. I’ll deal with the hassle for that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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So when brewery owners Darren Boyd and Taylor Rees got a major investment offer from their landlord, the Flyfisher Group, they planned to accept. Flyfisher, which owns or operates several properties and businesses in the neighborhood, would take a 40% share, and as a Black-owned business, it would lend legitimacy in the historically Black neighborhood, Rees said at the time.

But then Boyd and Rees got another offer: Norman Harris, who is a longtime advocate for the Five Points neighborhood, the president of the Juneteenth Music Festival and owner of the Holleran Group real estate and development firm, said a family was interested in buying the entire brewery, at 2736 Welton St., outright, according to Boyd. They assumed the family was associated with the Harrises, who are longtime property owners and investors in Five Points. Boyd and Rees said yes, selling 100% of Spangalang in May 2022 to an entity called WSB Holdings.

The names behind WSB, however, were a bit of a surprise. The entity is funded by a trust that was created in 2018 by Robert F. Smith, the Denver-raised billionaire who is one of the wealthiest African Americans in the United States and one of the richest men in the world, according to liquor licensing documents held by the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses. The goal of the trust, which Smith no longer controls, is to provide for his five children, the documents say; trusts like this are commonly used to pass on generational wealth.

Smith’s two eldest daughters, Zoe Smith, 26, and Eliana Smith, 21, are the directors of WSB Holdings, according to documents that are publicly available from the Colorado Department of Revenue’s liquor enforcement division, which regulates liquor licenses in the state. Zoe Smith signed the documents. California attorney John N. Staples III, who oversees the Robert F. Smith 2018 Gift Trust, is also listed on the liquor license paperwork.

WSB has a mailing address at the offices of the City Park Law Group, which is owned by local attorney Wayne Vaden, who is also Robert Smith’s cousin.

The ownership makes Spangalang one of just three known Black-owned breweries in Colorado; the other two are Novel Strand Brewing in Denver and Outworld Brewing in Longmont.

But why would Smith — who is valued at $9.2 billion, making him the 214th richest person in the world, according to Forbes — or his two eldest daughters, both of whom have addresses in New York City, have an interest in a tiny craft brewery in Colorado that makes fewer than 400 barrels of beer per year (roughly 800 kegs)?

The answers don’t appear to be something anyone wants to talk about.

Boyd, who is now employed by WSB Holdings as the production manager for Spangalang, deferred questions about the brewery’s ownership to Vaden and Harris.

Harris declined to comment while Vaden didn’t return emails seeking comment. Staples responded to an email but declined to comment on his own behalf or on behalf of the Smith sisters.

Haroun Cowans, president of the Five Points Business Improvement District, who initially responded to an email from The Denver Post, didn’t return further emails seeking comment.

But part of the reason for the connection between Spangalang and Robert Smith’s family is likely his ties to Denver. Smith was raised in Five Points, attending Carson Elementary, Gove Junior High and East High School before heading to Cornell University, where he earned a degree in chemical engineering in 1986. After that, he worked as an engineer and then earned an MBA so that he could focus on technology investments.

And although he went on to found his signature software and technology investment firm, Vista Equity Partners, in California, Smith, who now lives in Austin, Texas, still has family and an extensive network in Colorado, including property and ownership of Lincoln Hills, a private fishing club in Gilpin County that was founded 100 years ago as a recreational area for Black families.

He sometimes talks about his parents and his upbringing in Denver in public appearances, like a 2015 commencement speech he gave to American University students in Washington, D.C.

But Smith has also talked publicly about Five Points. In 2020, The Denver Post reported on a keynote speech Smith gave during Denver Startup Week, where he talked about the “tens of millions of dollars” he has invested in the Welton Street corridor, “the portion of Denver once known as the Harlem of the West for its importance to Black culture.”

Smith’s business partner in Lincoln Hills also happens to be Denver businessman Matthew Burkett, who founded the Flyfisher Group, which runs the LLC that is Spangalang’s landlord (and which made the first offer to invest in the brewery). Flyfisher has also run other restaurants and businesses in Five Points, where Burkett lives, including Moods Beats Potions and Mimosas.

As for Boyd, he is simply happy to see the business he co-founded continue to thrive.

“It has been a pleasure to see new life breathed into the brewery with new programming and a renewed energy about growing the business,” he said.

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