Claude Design Disrupts Web Design, EU Forces Social Media ID Checks | 04-24-26

[00:00:19] We call it Tech Watch for a reason. You may ask, what's that? Because we keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. I'm Sam Bushman. I've got Jay Harrison with me and we always talk tech.

[00:00:31] This broadcast is brought to you by NetworkProvidersInc.com, an all-hands-on-deck, white-glove IT service available for you anytime. Tell your business, tell your friends, tell everyone you know because we take care of security. We run a help desk. We run endpoints for protection and more. Email. I mean, there's nothing we don't do. AI, the list goes on and on and we're here to serve you. NetworkProvidersInc.com. Jay, welcome to the show, sir.

[00:01:00] Hey, Sam. How's it going? It's going fantastic. I don't know. How do they come up with these words? Anthropic. I don't know. I think they're looking for a domain is the problem, right? Nowadays, you've got to make up a word if you want a good domain. Yeah. And we're doing a lot of production work now. We're doing radio and TV and commercials and videos and all this kind of stuff for all kinds of people.

[00:01:24] We're going beyond just the traditional talk radio that we've done in the past now and we're doing music stuff and all kinds of stuff. And we've created a term called Beat Crew. Beat Crew. We're the Beat Crew, ladies and gentlemen. And so the Beat Crew can take care of your podcast, broadcast, video, audio, radio, TV, whatever, commercials. Anyway, all your production needs, think the Beat Crew, baby. Anyway, just thought I'd tell you that. But Anthropic, I thought, was a pretty crazy word, Jay.

[00:01:52] And I guess they rolled out their, what do they call it, a Claude Design? Is that what they call it? Yeah, they've launched their Claude Design last week. It's a dedicated app for building websites and designing marketing materials. And the interesting thing is this thing is coming out and a lot of people are scrambling. A lot of people are like, oh my gosh, this is going to take over a lot of people's marketing and design and website stuff.

[00:02:18] In fact, shares of Figma went down, which is another design kind of sweet, 7%. Even Adobe shares dropped 1.5% on the announcement that Claude Design is going to be a dedicated app made for building websites. And what's your take on this? Is this just going to obliterate that whole reality? No. I think it's going to do kind of what Canva did to design and stuff. It's just going to put it in the hands of more and more people and it's going to bring it down to earth. I mean, you've still got to have somebody driving it.

[00:02:46] You still have to have somebody giving it the prompts. But it's just going to make it easier for the average person, maybe with less design skill, maybe with less training or whatever, to be able to roll out a design for somebody. Somebody wants a website for their business or whatever and they're just going to be able to ask AI and do it. And it's just going to commonize it, I think, is what really happens. Here's what I'm thinking. Commoditize it. You're still going to want a web developer to take care of things.

[00:03:13] You can go to very simple web design tools and get a lot done. This is no different. What this is going to do, though, is quickly give you kind of design layouts. If I say I want a website for the Beat Crew, our new term for Beat Crew HQ is what the website is going to be called. So the headquarters, the studio. But it's going to instantly just kind of lay out and say, hey, if you want a website like that, here's your goal. Here's your slogans. Here's your phrases. Here's your terms. Here's your marketing pitch.

[00:03:43] Here's the things that you want on your website. Here's your. But it's going to still take some creative person to manage and to coordinate and do a lot of that. And I know we think, oh, you're just going to hit a button and it's going to be done. Maybe. But people are still going to want a human touch. There's a difference when we talk about connections between just AI spewing out just tons of data versus the human touch. And so I created a term for the Beat Crew, for example, this production group. Why are we the Beat Crew?

[00:04:13] Because we set the beat. You come into your studio and you tell us, hey, here's the beat of what I want. And then, hey, we roll out the beat and you carry the tune. You tell the tale. And it's your show and it's whatever you're doing. You're the artist. You're the musician. You're the. And we're like the house musicians. We're like the producers. We're like the guys that run the scenes. We're the people that put together and run the commercials for you. We take care of all that back end. So you know what? We lay down the beat. You carry the tune. There's a song, actually, that talks about that. But so we're the Beat Crew.

[00:04:43] Well, the reason I'm bringing this up is because it can then say, well, the Beat Crew doesn't need to be an e-commerce website. The Beat Crew needs to be a professional. And so it can lay out all these framework for this website stuff, Jay. And then but a human touch needs to fill it in. So what's the, you know, taglines for these companies and things? You know, ChatDBT can throw you out 50 of them in two seconds, way faster than I can dream of them. Right.

[00:05:09] But I can select the one and give it direction and eventually refine it, refine it, refine it to where it means something. So here's one of the phrases the Beat Crew is going to use. Ready? Okay. It says this. We do the work. You take the credit. I like it. Yeah. But it's just going to speed up turnaround time. Because we want to be your Beat Crew. We want to be your support team. We're the in-house musicians. We're the staff. But you can still take the credit. If I play the saxophone on your music song, but it's Jay Harrison, you know, whatever.

[00:05:39] Like Kendrick Lamar or whatever you are. Yeah. I don't get credit, really, if I'm the musician on there. I mean, I might have my... You'll have your name on my... I might have my name on the credits or whatever, but no one knows. No one cares. You know what I mean? At the end of the day. So, hey, we do the work. You get the credit. You take the credit. We're glad about that. We want that. It's about you shining and us being a support. So anyway, I don't mean to go on about my own personal projects, but this is kind of how it's used and how I think it'll really be used.

[00:06:08] Every time an industrial revolution or equivalent happens, we think the end of the world is happening. TV comes, radio's dead. Everybody does. Okay. It's not true. And it never has been true. And it never will be true. A lot of jobs will go away. There's no doubt about it. But there's a lot, a lot, a lot of new things that are going to be happening and new power. Now the bar for quality websites is just higher. That's all, Jay. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of like YouTube and things when they come out.

[00:06:34] You know, everybody thought, oh, this is going to kill, you know, mainstream media or whatever because anybody can now have a platform. And it has affected it, right? But it hasn't killed it. And it's just going to bring more options to more people and speed development. And you're just going to have things faster and more available and, you know. And interestingly enough, it's going to be to where all bars at first are going to go down. So when everybody can produce content, now people are doing it on the cheap. They're doing it without money.

[00:07:03] They're doing it without experience. And the bar drops a ton at first. Right. But then eventually those kind of people start to get weeded out and this and that. And then what we've really done is raise the bar for everybody. Now it can be done faster, cheaper, smarter, better. And we just got to remember we need to let tech serve us, not own us. And if we do that, I think this is going to be fine. So what's Adobe going to do now that their shares took a hit over this or this other, what's that company called? That is Figma. Figma. Okay. What are these companies going to do now?

[00:07:33] And my response is they need to respond in a way that gives them a leadership position. Yeah. You know what? You can use Grok or Claude for this or whatever. But now we can do this with that. Right? Yeah. That's what they got to do. Exactly. They just need to one-up it and compete. And, you know, a 7% hit, that's kind of big for Figma. 1.5% hit for Adobe. That's big just because of how big Adobe is, right? But, you know, they're going to step back.

[00:08:03] They're going to punt. They're going to compete with this. And they're going to roll out their own. And they already have rolled out their own. I mean, Canva now has this new magic layer thing. You can just drop an image into there. And it breaks all of the pieces of the image into separate layers automatically. And you can move them around and resize the pieces individually. And this is from a static photo. This is the AI doing this. It's incredible, by the way. Yeah. It's really incredible. And that's what they're going to do. They're just going to continue to innovate. And we're just seeing innovation at, like, warp speed now.

[00:08:30] And the people that can stay ahead of that, which is the real challenge, the people who can tie all this supposed magic to changes. And let me explain changes for a minute. Not to hype, but to real concrete one decrease of errors and mistakes. In other words, cleaner data, cleaner, you know. Yep. Saving of time.

[00:08:59] Time, time, time. And money, money, money. Money. If I can decrease errors, decrease time, and decrease spend. In other words, produce more for less. Now I'm getting somewhere. And the people who understand that are going to win in AI. They're going to win in some of these technologies. Those who don't understand that are going to either fall behind or miss the vote. Okay? It isn't about who can create the most magic.

[00:09:23] It's about who can tie that magic to productivity, to less error and less confusion and less difficulty and less. And who can do it in a time and money saving way. Those are the people that are going to win, Jay. AI by itself is not really too valuable except for just getting a super answers, a super Google, if you will. It's where it ties to automation and ties to actual tasks that real jobs, real work, real benefit, real ROI, if you will, return on investment gets done.

[00:09:52] Exactly. And it's funny that we've been sitting, or at least I have, ever since the rise of Google. And, you know, we saw it like knock AltaVista off in a year. Nobody even remembers that. AltaVista? What's that? Right. And it's been like, you know what? And you know it's going to happen. When is it going to happen that Google is going to get, you know, the next best thing is going to come along? And I think that thing is ChadGPT now. And it's happened within just a couple of years where people, I think, the use of Google has gone down dramatically.

[00:10:22] And people are using GPT for everything. Amen. And Grok. And Claude. Claude is really starting to take the world by storm too because Claude is a little bit better positioned to actually take actions and tie their AI, or this critical reasoning layer, if you will, to automation. That's critical too. People don't realize that. ChatGPT is a little bit behind in that. Things are going to change quickly, but it is. One of the things that Claude is releasing with this latest version and everything else and that they've released,

[00:10:50] there's a debate between Claude and GPT on how this is going down. But Claude has released these tools that are supposedly able to find bugs and find solutions and prevent from getting hacked. Maybe France needs that, Jay. Yeah, they do. Interesting tidbit from Pavel Dura. Oh, wow. France's Agency for Secure Documents was hacked. They had names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, 19 million people linked from a single government database.

[00:11:19] Future leaks will be even more catastrophic if the French government gets what it wants, which is access to encrypted chats and digital IDs of social media users. And that's why Pavel and others, you know, he's the inventor of Telegram, is pushing for this stuff and saying, hey, governments don't need this decryption access because they're one of the worst offenders as far as data leaks. Well, not only do they not need the decryption access, I don't even understand why they think they need the data in the first place. Well, and that's a whole other argument. Yeah.

[00:11:49] One is the debate about can they get a backdoor and decrypt something. The other one is why would we allow the government to have access to that information in the first place? There is this thing called privacy. I know governments don't understand that, but they need to. The EU, for example, wants to be in the middle of everything, too. We'll talk about that coming up. You are watching and listening to the one and only Tech Watch. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Cybercrime is exploding. Take Sarah from Sweet Delights,

[00:12:17] whose world crumbled after having to close with not being able to bounce back. Small businesses are prime targets, but the right strategies can keep yours safe. Jay Hill, CEO of Network Providers, has co-authored The Cyber Playbook Simplifies Cybersecurity for Business Owners with Strategies to Avoid Costly Breaches and Fines. Build a strong cyberattack response. Secure your business with key protections.

[00:12:44] Cyber threats aren't slowing down, but you can stay ahead. Protect your business. Ensure its security for tomorrow. Get the Cyber Playbook today at networkprovidersinc.com slash cyber dash playbook or call 385-446-5500 now. Are you watching what's happening in our country and asking,

[00:13:14] what can I do? Join the John Birch Society in Salt Lake City, June 6th, for a powerful one-day conference. The day includes a host of respected speakers, two meals, and meaningful connections. You'll gain clarity on the issues and walk away with practical steps you can take to your community. Reserve your seat today at jbs.org forward slash slc26. That's jbs.org forward slash slc26.

[00:13:50] All right, ladies and gentlemen, the headline alone concerns me. The EU wants to force. Jay, when I hear that, I just go, ooh. Yeah. Every fiber of my being goes, whoa, hold on, what? They get their way a lot, though, right? I mean, they got their way with the USB-C on the iPhone. The EU, for some reason, has a lot of force, even against American companies and people that aren't in the EU.

[00:14:17] But they want to force mandatory ID checks on anyone using social media. They're going to ban people under 18 from accessing it. To that end, the EU Commission is spending over a year building an age verification app, which is presently going to be unveiled soon. Today, the app has already gotten hacked in just about two minutes from when it got released, right? Yeah. But it says don't rush to run. They need to run Claude on that thing and fix it, Jay. Come on.

[00:14:46] Well, that's another issue. So these AIs are better at catching a lot of bugs than humans are, but they're still not perfect. The age verification app was hackable by design. It trusted the device, which is an instant game over. And unless the EU is run by clowns, this is their real plan. Again, this is from Pavel Durov. He says, in step one, present a privacy-respecting but hackable app. Step two, get hacked. We're right here right now. In step three, remove the privacy to fix the app.

[00:15:16] So the result is a surveillance tool sold as privacy-respecting. The EU bureaucrats needed an excuse to silently start turning their privacy-respecting age verification app into a surveillance mechanism all over Europeans using social media. Today's surprising hack is just another excuse that handed them this. And he says, stay vigilant. Will this eventually turn out to be a global ID, Jay? I don't know. I don't think so. Because if we say it's only for social media, then we say, yeah, and you're banking.

[00:15:44] Man, we can't get all the states to agree on an ID just here in America. So I don't know that you'll get a global ID. If you agree or not, though, if you have a global standard and you have some nations, let's say the United Nations or somebody signs on, and then you say you've got to have this for social media, and then eventually you say, and banking, now where are we? Yeah, they could force a hand with a small minority. The reason I bring that up, though, is the headline here says EU forces. Right. So I'm just telling you, I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist,

[00:16:14] but I do mean to kind of follow the tech trend and say, is that where they're headed? I pray the answer is no, and it's up to we the people around the world whatever you want to say to really kind of put a stop to that and say, no, we need some governance on this, and we don't want the government being the governance control mechanism. We don't. And we need to really understand and deal with this in meaningful ways. I think a lot of the AI is getting ahead of the governance reality, and if we're not very careful, it's going to decide. We're not.

[00:16:42] Yeah, that's always a worry, though, that AI is going to end up being the nanny of everything. Yeah. Anyway, very scary. Any other tidbits on this? No, I just think it's interesting, and his point is they're rolling out this thing in the name of the children and privacy, of course, but it's just a backhanded way to get things out there, say it got hacked, and then say, oh, we have to fix this now, and we're going to nerf the encryption in it,

[00:17:09] and basically you've sideloaded a spyware into your phone by the time you're done. And the reality is, is that fact in what they really did? And we don't know. Yeah. But that is the result, whether that was intentional or not. Right. That's the reality, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's also important to finalize this topic in my mind, Jay, by understanding this. What are they going to use if we're going to talk about everybody's got to verify or prove that they're whatever? What methods are going to be deployed to guarantee that?

[00:17:38] And right now, anything that really does this in a meaningful way to me is very invasive. Sam, you've got to take a live picture of yourself, and you've got to this, and you've got to that. And you've got to, when you do that for the DMV, or if you take, for example, continuing education testing, or you do the rigorous way they force you, hey, you've got to be in a room that we know is yours. I mean, they do all kinds of very strange, very invasive things right now. The IRS is doing this now with young people.

[00:18:04] I see many people that, when they first filed their tax returns now, they've got to go through a real ID process and get online with a phone and basically take a FaceTime, like a Face ID, move your head around, and check it against your ID and upload all this stuff. They're already doing this, and they're not doing it to the older guys that have been filing for decades. But, you know, I see, like, my kids that are becoming adults. Yet. Yet what? They're going to do it. Oh, yeah, yet. Not yet. Not yet.

[00:18:34] Yet. Yet. No, I think that they're thinking, hey, we've got enough history on these. We know these are legitimate. These guys are going to die off in another couple of decades. Whatever. We're getting everybody used to. You're going to Face ID when you start an account and when you go on the IRS with your first Yes, how quick they'll mandate it is a good point. And they might let, you know, hey, the above 55 people just do whatever. And you're right. I mean, it won't be instant. But over time, that's what's going to be. Well, and they don't even have to mandate it. They're just putting this in and saying, hey, if you want to file, you need to verify now. Yeah.

[00:19:03] It's just being rolled out without, you know, I don't think there's been any huge legislation that's been approved or anything. It's just somebody's policy. And that's why I'm saying when you say somebody's policy, who's? Is it the EU's? Is it Claude's? Is it Facebook? Is it, you know, meta? Is it what's driving this? Who's in control? And that's what I'm saying is right now it's all fragmented and everybody's kind of doing what they want. It's the wild, wild west. A little bit of the AI industry. Yeah.

[00:19:33] I personally, I like that. A little bit of the wild, wild west in the AI industry. I think that's where innovation happens, too. I think when you get a lot of regulation and the industry becomes mature, the innovation starts to stagnate. We saw that with Bitcoin. You know, for a while, Bitcoin was the wild west. I mean, there was no taxes on revenue and it was crazy and all over the place. That was awesome. Right. And now it's becoming just like a commodity and things that everybody's saying, well,

[00:19:59] it might be susceptible to quantum crypto, you know, that it might break it. And then it's cooled off a lot because of, I think, in my opinion, one of the reasons is because of the overregulation of it. I got a fun headline for you. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. People know that one. But how about this one? AI takes over doom scrolling so you don't have to. It's going to doom scroll for you? Yes, sir. Man, I've seen the thing. It's called no scroll.

[00:20:29] And no scroll promises to replace endless scrolling with, quote, AI summaries, Jay. A new tool called no scroll will automatically scan and scroll and summarize content aiming to reduce time suck, time spent endlessly scrolling while keeping you informed. So, hey, you can use AI. I mean, there's a lot of AI things that I want them doing, right? Spying on me and everything else. Yeah. But this one's kind of cool.

[00:20:57] If you can say, hey, I don't need to doom scroll anymore, but you can give me summaries of what I kind of want to know and keep me up on things. I'm a little sick of AI summaries, though. You get it on every one day. I get an email from Sam that's two sentences, and Google wants to put an AI summary above it. I don't need a summary for a two-sentence email. I just read it. Well, you know why you get a two-sentence email from me, don't you, Jay? Because Sam's already summarizing it. Yeah, and I didn't have AI do it, though. I don't need AI to give Jay a summary.

[00:21:27] I can give Jay a summary by myself. I saw a funny cartoon. It's just two panels. And the one guy writes his email and has AI expanded into this long thing. And the other guy doesn't even read the email. He has AI summarize it back down to the two sentences. And that is the quintessential point, isn't it? Yeah. When do we just have so much data we can't even use it? And when does data become meaningful? See, that's what I'm talking about when it comes to AI. Just I can write you a book doesn't impress me. Right. I can write you a million books.

[00:21:56] Because now I need a summary of it. That doesn't impress me. Now I need a summary. What I really need is information that dovetails to return on investment of time, money, less prone to errors. You know, all those things are business values for me. If you don't tie it to that, it doesn't mean much. It's just hype and bogus. Yeah. Yeah. There was somebody, I forget, it might have been Winston Churchill that was making a speech. And he said, if I'd have had more time, I would have made this shorter. You know, because that's what you need. That's what we really want.

[00:22:26] Well, and you compare that to college essays now. I don't know if you know, but to get into college, they used to have you write these big old long essays. Now they're like, I want you to write an essay in less than 150 words. It's like, well, how do I write an essay that short? And they're like, that is the point. Right. Because they're really trying to get you to think it's harder to write a 30 second or 15 second quality radio commercial or TV commercial than it is a longer one. That's exactly right. And to do it right and to make it punch, right? Well, yeah, it's easy if you don't do it right.

[00:22:56] If you just spew something, it's easy. But I'm talking about if you refine it and you really want to get the quality points of a hook to sell, something that is iconic, that stays in your memory, that can last generationally. And, you know, these kind of things like Tom Beaudet, Motel 6, we'll leave the light on for you kind of commercials. Yeah. But it's hard to get those things done. And the shorter time you have, the harder it is to do.

[00:23:24] So writing an essay that's 150 words or 200 words or whatever is way harder than writing one that's 700 words. Because you've got to have the opening paragraph, the heart of the argument, the closing, that, you know, you've got to have the same elements in the thing. And so it's very, very difficult. Pretty soon we'll be wanting to get summaries of summaries, Jay. I know. That's where we're headed. They're having a problem with this already in places like Reddit and stuff.

[00:23:50] Reddit wants to do like a face ID check just to make sure that you're human. They still want the anonymity because that's where people will write really what they feel. But there's a huge bot problem right now of just so much content being just dumped and spewed onto the Internet. And it's all bots. And I don't know what the solution is. All right. Well, there's going to be a big old showdown on Monday. $150 million showdown.

[00:24:19] It's in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk sues OpenAI. Right? Did I say million? I mean billion. Things huge. Billion with a billion. Billions of dollars. Anyway, I just thought I'd tease that. Jury selection starts on Monday. And he's suing because he says they're not honoring their existence requirements. Anyway, thought we'd just brief you on that. Thanks so much. We keep an eye on tech. NPITechguys.com. Make it a great tech day, will ya? We'll see you