On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, co-hosts Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh sat down with Avram Piltch, the new U.S. Editor for The Register. Avram is driven by his lifelong love of both computers and writing, blending the two to become the “web dude” for several online publications spurring a long technology journalism career.
Avram lets his passion for technology drive his reporting, getting his hands on today’s top technologies to truly compare and benchmark the technology for the best possible reporting that brings clear insights to his readers. A true tech lover, Avram has tested many products, built a dozen or so PCs and has even entered PC building competitions.
Does AI Have the Right To Learn?
When discussing today’s technology landscape, of course the conversation had to touch on AI. Avram says he is all about pushing technology to its very limit, but we all must understand the limit of what technology can do. He says, “there’s a lot of room to figure out what businesses are using AI for and ask is it a good use of the technology?”
According to Avram, some poor uses of the technology and where his fellow journalists see AI displacing quality journalism is the Google AI Overview feature. To combat this, Avram created a Google Chrome extension called “Bye Bye Google AI” that erases these overviews. Currently 50,000 people are using the extension.
Hand’s On Articles
“Our job is not to help companies sell their products, our job is to tell readers the truth about how something works,” Arvam shared. When writing his “Hand’s On” articles he looks at what products are doing right and what they are doing wrong. He takes this approach when reporting to find out all he can about a product and share it with consumers so they can make informed decisions based on his insights. Avram is “always trying to bust someone.” That said, his favorite article for The Register so far was his piece on Microsoft Recall investigating whether the technology would take screenshots of your sensitive personal data.
Tune in to this episode or read the transcript to hear more from Avram about his take on AI, how he approaches his position as editor at The Register, how he prefers to be pitched, his work on digital access and so much more!
Timestamps:
0:23 – Christine and Madison’s Podcast Preview
1:42 – Avram’s Background
7:20 – How Avram’s Personal Interests Contributes to His Writing
11:12 – Building PC’s
13:51 – Most Surprising Trend He’s Covered
16:56 – Ensuring Digital Access
20:18 – Hand’s On Style Articles
24:19 – Delegating Stories at The Register
30:06 – How Avram Likes To Be Pitched
35:35 – Avram’s Favorite TV Shows
Transcript
Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. This is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio at W2 Communications, let’s go inside the media minds.
All right, so on today’s episode, we talked to Avram Piltch, who’s the U.S. Editor at The Register. And I personally loved hearing him talk about really everything, because he’s so invested in technology. It’s clear he’s built a bunch of PCs. He does a lot of hands on work with technology, you can tell he really lives and breathes technology. He even mentioned on the episode that he built a browser extension to overcome Google AI, which is so cool, Madison, what were some of your favorite parts?
Madison Farabaugh (MF): Yeah, I think I really enjoyed hearing Avram’s perspective that, you know, everybody has the right or should have a computer, and he dove into different opportunities and charitable organizations and teams that are making that dream happen. So I think our listeners will definitely love to hear more about that.
CB: Yeah, we also learned how he likes to be pitched, and then some of the key topics that they’re covering at The Register right now. So we hope everyone enjoys this episode. Hey, everyone. This is Christine Blake, one of the co-hosts of Inside the Media Minds.
MF: And this is Madison Farabaugh, the other co-host.
CB: And today we’re excited to have Avram Piltch on the podcast, the U.S. Editor at The Register. Welcome.
Avram Piltch (AP): Thank you so much for having me.
CB: Absolutely. So you just joined The Register as the U.S. editor last month, but you’ve been in this industry for over 25 years, right?
AP: Yes, quite a long time. I try not to think about it too much, because I don’t want people to to think to figure out how old I am, but other but, yeah, I’ve been doing this for a while.
CB: Awesome. Well, we’d love to hear more about your background, how you got into the industry, and then your role at the at The Register.
AP: Sure. So I mean, I when I was growing up in the 80s, I always loved computers. Always really enjoyed them. Friend of mine when I was in college, taught me how to build my own PCs, which I loved doing, and then and I was an English major, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with myself after college, so I went to graduate school for a couple years, and I got a degree in English literature, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do with that.
But while I was at NYU, this thing called the World Wide Web became a phenomenon, and I was on the literary magazine, and we built a website there. And so I learned how to how to program websites. So I had this background in both, you know, English and writing and in websites. And I started to do journalism jobs, and I became the like web dude for for some publications. So I became the, my first, like, real full time job, I worked for a publication called National Jeweler, which was really boring, but I got to do their website, and I got got to do some writing. And then I got a job working for About.com which, well, originally was called The Mining Company, and then they changed the name to About.com which was a very large website with a lot of different experts. And I was the Editor for the Computing Channel for for a while, and I worked with a lot of people who were very tech savvy, and I wanted to keep up with them, so I had a couple of different computers, and I would go and, you know, I had someone who wrote about Linux, I’d run Linux. I had someone who wrote about Windows, I’d run Windows. I do all of the things necessary to to understand what my writers are doing, and I and while I was at About.com, I started doing a lot of programming, even though it wasn’t part of my editorial job. And I ended up programming an intranet.
And then after I’d been at About.com about nine years, I got this job working for Laptop Magazine, which was really a dream for me, because then I got to do more, more in depth reviews. I got to review products. I got to go to trade shows. I got to do all kinds of stuff, and I worked with the crew at Laptop Mag for 11 years. And our company was bought by another company called Perch, which later bought Tom’s Hardware and Tom’s Guide, and I became the Editor in Chief of Tom’s Hardware. So. Seven years ago, I helped them increase traffic dramatically and really change how they were doing things. And I got to do a lot of really cool fun stuff. Got to go to Taiwan like 10 times, to visit, to visit, to compute coverage. Got to review a lot of a lot of really cool hardware. Got to meet a lot of really neat people. Programmed a whole bunch of things for the company, like Chrome extensions and an intranet and things like that.
Again, not totally part of my job, but became part of my job because I love to fool around with code, and that’s something that I do in my spare time, and I really enjoy so I love to see how things work. I love to see how how how technology works. I love to take things apart and put them together, and I love to and I love to work with code, and I love to take that and explain how that works to other people and share that passion with others. And after having been with laptop and Tom’s Hardware for a total of 18 years, they’re both owned by the same company now, future, I decided it was time for me to move into a more enterprise oriented publication so I could really learn more about how people are doing in the IT space, and how people who really make your computers work and hand the computers off to what they are doing and how it’s affecting them, and really work with that very targeted audience. So I got the job just last month, working for The Register, and I’m really excited to be there and to be working with some really incredibly talented folks so that we can do some really neat, neat stories to help the folks who are really, you know, making your computers run and making and making all the tech decisions.
CB: Well, it seems like you’re in the exact right spot. You have so much experience with, like writing and that aspect, and then also the technology background, so it seems like the perfect position for you, truly,
AP: Yeah. So I’m really excited to be there. It’s been a month, but I’m learning a lot.
MF: Yeah, that’s wonderful, especially just to hear the the wide variety of experience you have being, you know, the web guy, doing the programming, helping get websites set up, doing reviews. And then now to your current role at The Register. We even saw in your bio that in your free time, you know, you custom build PCs, you do 3D printing, you experiment with Raspberry Pi, all of this very interesting stuff that kind of like what you were talking about, it takes some of your passion areas, and you’re kind of now able to merge that with a lot of your work. So is there, can you elaborate, maybe, on how you know your personal interests and passions, how that special interest in technology has contributed to perhaps how you write your stories, or how you do your reporting.
AP: Absolutely. I mean, nobody, I don’t think anybody gets into being into technology journalism for the money. If we were trying, if we were just in this to try and be wealthy, then there would be other areas we’d go into, right? We go into this because we have a passion. Now, some people just have a passion for journalism, and they land in technology. But for me, I always wanted to work for tech publication. When I was a teenager, I’d be, you know, picking up Computer Shopper, PC Mag, or my first personal favorite, Maximum PC, and I’d be flipping through the pages, and I would just absolutely wish that I could be the one write, doing the writing and doing the testing and getting to play with the toys like we get to play with toys and we get to write about it, how it doesn’t get any better than that. So, so I really try to, when I was at Tom Hardware, I really tried to get in a lot of products that I was interested in, things that I thought people should know about.
One of my favorites was when I got in the world’s largest keyboard, I reviewed a keyboard that had 178 keys, which I think is more than any other keyboard. And I wrote to the company that made it, and said, “Hey, can you send me one of these? I’d really like to try it,” and and they did so that so that was so that was really cool. And just always getting, getting in really neat products. I mean, my my son, who’s 13, is always, was always asking me, what did you bring home today? What you know? What are you what are you messing with? Now, at The Register, we’re a little bit more focused on IT news. So I haven’t done a lot of product stuff yet, but I do do some degree of testing here, and I and I’m hoping to do some more. And you know, I’m just constantly looking for things that interest me to either work with our writers on, or for me to write, because I really, and I love to get hands on with the technology. Technology. I don’t like to do things where I’m just talking about how something works without actually having used it. I think it’s really important to use things. I think it’s really important to compare things. I think it’s when it’s possible. I think it’s really important to benchmark things. One of the tasks that I had in the 18 years I was at laptop and Tom’s Hardware was that I built a lot of the benchmarks that they use. So we had a laptop battery test, and I programmed the battery test in C Sharp so that it would go and it would visit a certain number of websites, and it would log the amount of time that it that the computer was on, and then eventually refine that test a little bit, changing the brightness that we use, changing the websites that we visited, things like that. So it was so I really enjoy being able to find that little nugget of information about a piece of technology that not everyone has, or maybe nobody else has, and bring that to the audience.
CB: That’s interesting. Um, I actually have, I experienced building a computer, like a PC, one time, and I was surprised at how almost simple it was. It’s like, you have these, like, key components, you put it together, and I’m like, Oh, wow, anyone could do this. How many have you built over the years?
AP: Oh, you know, probably a couple dozen. I mean, you know, I should have, I should have built more. But, you know, whenever it comes time for me to do it, or something for my son, or we did some, some building at Tom Hardware for work, I don’t think I’ll be building any PCs as part of my job at The Register, because corporate IT departments don’t do that, but it’s I found it’s pretty easy at one time I was when I used to go to CompuTech, and that not coming when I used to go to CES. I guess it’s up in the air whether I’m going to be going to CES this year. We used to have a PC building race there that they would actually was hosted by Tiger Direct, which I don’t know if they’re still in business, but was a major value added reseller. So they would have a thing. It was a PC race for charity. And what they would do is they would invite various journalists, and when I started working for laptop, I found out who ran the race, and I tried to get myself on the list, because I really wanted to do it, and I did. And what they would do is they would have the PC set up for you to build, and they would time it, and whoever built their PC first and booted it up was the winner. And then they would donate a certain amount to the charity of that person’s choice. Although that PC building was much easier because a lot of the parts were already in the computer. So, you know where it might take me, like, three hours to build a PC at home. You were supposed to be able to complete that build in like, five or 10 minutes. So, but a lot, like I said, a lot of the stuff was already in the computer. The motherboard and the CPU were in, like, a lot of the stuff that’s the most time consuming was already done for you. So it wasn’t that wasn’t that challenging. The big challenge was not dropping screws on the floor. And I failed at that challenge.
CB: Oh gosh, yeah, you need one of those magnet boards for the screws, right?
AP: Yeah. I mean, you really need magnet, a magnetic screwdriver. I think that’s the most important thing that you can have in building a PC. And also, I you could, there’s this little yellow thing you can buy that had that looks like the things that you use to pick up a stuffed animal in one of those machines. And you can get that to pick up a screw off of the circuits, because it’s really off of the circuit board, because you, if a screw is rolling around and you turn on a computer, it can short out. So you don’t want that.
CB: Cool. So in your in your years of reporting and covering technology, what has been one of the most significant or surprising trends that you’ve covered?
AP: Well, everybody talks about everybody talks about AI these days, and it’s getting a little bit played, but I did do some coverage. I’ve done some coverage about whether or not AI has the right to learn, because a lot of people think that AI is a person or should be treated like a person, and therefore, if you can read a book, “Why can’t my AI read a million books and learn from them,” and I did a story a couple years ago where I interviewed AI experts and lawyers, and we really talked about whether or not, whether or not, training is ethically and legally the same as a person learning, and I came to the conclusion that it is not. But I think we’re still in a world where people are really wowed by what generative AI can do, and so, you know, I’ve heard from some people like how you shouldn’t speak. You shouldn’t say negative things about generative AI, because it’s the future. You. You know, that’s the future. Everyone has to use it, but I think we really need to question more. Like, I’m a big fan of like, pushing technology to the very limit. I think that’s great, but we also need to understand the limit of what technology can do. And so we don’t want to have a human doing a robot’s job. That’s why I build all these tools, and we don’t want a robot doing something that’s uniquely human. So, so I think there’s a lot of there’s a lot of room here to try and figure out, like, you know, what are businesses using AI for, and is it a good use of the technology? There are a lot of good uses of the technology, and there are some poor use of the technology that are being used as an excuse to cut labor costs. And I think, I think that’s a mistake. Obviously, most journalists that you talk to have a deep interest in what is going on with AI being used in journalism and AI displacing us in places like Google with the Google AI overviews, I’ve published a Chrome extension called “Bye Bye Google AI” that that erases the Google AI overviews for people, and 50,000 people are using it right now.
CB: Wow, that’s fascinating.
AP: So, so I think what’s going on with AI, obviously, is an area of great concern to all of us who feel like we might be displaced by it, but it’s also an area of great concern to anyone who cares about a good using technology for something that is advancing human knowledge, versus using technology for ways to, you know, to cheap for a company to cheap out on providing good service.
MF: Yeah, that makes sense. And that was a that was a helpful rundown on kind of your perspective on, you know, what might be over hyped with AI, or where the concerns don’t need to be versus where we should actually be focusing. So that was super helpful. Um, does that influence, like your perspective on AI and just paying attention to current trends. Is that something that you’re interested in covering at The Register right now, or are there other topics that you’re currently focused on, or maybe you don’t think get enough attention from the media?
AP: Well, I think, I think obviously people should, I mean, we are obviously spending a lot of time on AI, because that’s a big story right now, and will probably remain a big story for for many years to come, although there is a bubble, and I do think it’s going to burst with the kind of the amount that people are investing in AI, so that maybe that may become the story. I think that obviously we should be looking at things that are like helpful to individuals and helpful to IT decision makers. So for example, right now, I’m working on a story on how, on the best way to dispose of your to just come for companies to dispose of their end of life, laptops. I think, obviously environment is an important issue, as is digital access. In my spare time, I do some work with a with a P with a computer refurbishing charity that gives people who can’t afford a computer takes old computers that have been donated by someone brought usually or by a business, and restores them and gives them to people who who don’t have one, because everyone should have a computer, not just a phone. And you know what I found is a lot of companies would give us laptops with no SSD in them because they were afraid of their data being misappropriated. So that’s a question that I’m that I’m going to start researching right now for a story which is like, what’s the best businesses have a concern about their data, particularly if they have sensitive data, like health information on their laptops, but if they want to donate it to charity or they want to recycle it, how do they make sure that that that that data doesn’t get into the wrong hands, and how do they make sure that they’re also doing the best possible thing that they can do for the environment and for other people.
MF: That’s awesome. It sounds like a really great cause, too, that we haven’t heard too much about before.
AP: I mean, obviously the digital divide is a big issue, and a lot of people feel that you can fix it by giving people phones or giving people tablets, but there’s still a lot of things that you can’t do unless you have a computer. And so, like everyone, everyone should have a computer. I’m a firm believer in that. I think every child should have a computer, not not just every family, because when you have a computer, then you can learn programming, then you can really take control. In particular, I’m a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, which is, which is something that a lot of kids use, and universe and university students use, and other people use to learn about electronics and to learn about programming. I think, you know, everyone should go out and buy a Raspberry Pi and find find some way. To use it to learn if, if nothing else, you could use it for games. You could use it as a server, but there’s just so much opportunity out there for people to take control of technology and not just be passive consumers of it.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great perspective, and an important one too. We’ve seen a variety of your hands on style articles that are labeled as such. How do you approach this type of article differently, and what kind of things do you highlight in those types of articles?
AP: Well, I’m always trying to bust someone, right? So I really love to do hands on articles the most. I love to try and use something and find a secret feature or a secret flaw in it. So one of the favorite articles that I’ve done so far for The Register is when I used Microsoft Recall. Do you guys know what Microsoft Recall is?
CB: Yeah, we, I think we saw, we saw this article too. I was going to bring it up.
AP: Okay, yeah. So when I use Microsoft Recall, and I wanted to see if it would this is a pieces for people who don’t know. This is a piece of software that Microsoft has put on certain Copilot plus AI PCs, that record takes a screenshot of everything you do so that you can remember it. It’s like a digital memory for you. But it’s very controversial, because taking all those screenshots is like invading your own privacy, and it’s a treasure trove, if a hacker were able to get in and see your see your data. So what, what I did was I wanted to see if it would take screenshots of my bank account, of credit cards or social security numbers, because Microsoft says that it uses AI to avoid those things. And I went, I created a whole bunch of scenarios where I tried to feed it credit card numbers, I tried to go to online shopping, I tried to go log into my bank accounts, things like that. And I found that for a lot of them it was good, but for some it was not, and I was sitting there in front of the computer like, I hope I can catch them, because if everything worked perfectly, tech journalists would have no job, right? If everything worked as as advertised, like, our job is not to be PR. Our job is not to is not to help companies sell their products. Our job is to tell readers the truth about how something works. So if everything worked perfectly, then there’s no need for us to do to be here. But when we have something that is inviting us to test it, is inviting us to find the flaw in it, then I’m going to want to go in and try and find that flaw. So when I use something, I’m trying to find out, like, what is this nugget of information that makes this stand out? Is there something new that I can do with it, that the maker of the product and anticipate? Is there something I can find out about it, like, exactly how long it lasts on a charge, if it’s a battery operated laptop, you know, what are the what are the things that I can find out and share with the audience? Because we’re in a privileged position here as tech journalists. We get to, as I said, we get to play with toys, and then we have to write about it. Not everybody gets to do that. Not everyone has time to do that. Not everyone has access to the resources to do that. And if we get to go to convention, not everybody gets to go. So when we are getting this special access that we get, our responsibility is to share that with other people and to share insight with them. So I I’m going to look at what is, what is this thing doing right, and what is it doing wrong? And if I can catch it doing something wrong, that’s the best, because then I can, I can prove that not everything is just like it says in the spec sheet or in the or in the PR release.
MF: Well, yeah, and that’s super important too, just getting getting that extra layer of information that people might not, you know, naturally find on their own, but you know how to look for it, and you know how to find that information. So it’s definitely a crucial role that we appreciate. And I guess kind of segueing into more of your role at The Register in terms of you know, responsibilities and functions. How do you delegate between you know, the stories that you write yourself, and how do you choose those versus the other stories that you might pass along to your team of writers?
AP: So I have a really fantastic team of writers that I that I work with at The Register, and I have a really fantastic Editor-in-Chief, and Matt Rosoff, who’s my boss. So we have a couple of shift the way it works at The Register is we have a couple of shifts. We have a UK team that comes on way before I wake up in the morning. Then I come on at like 8 a.m. Eastern, and I, work with and I edit some of the things that the UK team is working on, and then I assign stories to the U.S. team for the day. Some of those folks on the U.S. team come on at, like, are on the West Coast, so they’re coming on at, you know, 11/12 a.m., so I’m sitting there editing stuff from other folks, and I’m assigning to folks, and I try and each person has different skill set, right? Some, and I have a different skill set than than they do, right? So we have, we have someone like Jessica Lyons, who’s incredibly well versed in technology, unbelievable talent. I can’t do what she does, no way. And I have to say that, before I started working here, I had a after I accept the job, and before I started, I had a few weeks to to prepare. And I was spending a lot of time just reading every all the writers stories, and tried to get familiar with their beats and see what they’re good at. And I looked at a lot of them, and I said, if you assign the story to me, there’s no way I could do it. Like some of the, some of the stories she does on like, you know, almost, pretty much every story she does. I if you assign it to me right now, I couldn’t do it because she has the background and the expertise to not just accurately describe all those security flaws. But to to tell you that, oh, this is part of a trend. This happened before. These are who the big gangs are right now that are that are invading different servers. These are the gangs that that work for China. These are the gangs that are in Russia, right and I’m still learning those things, and I may never have, I probably will never have the level of knowledge that she does. So what I assigned to people is what they’re is what they are good at, what the story is that. I mean, my primary job is to be an editor, but I really like to write, and I really feel like I’m not contributing enough if I’m not writing so so I I pitch Matt, who’s the Editor-in-Chief, stories all the time of things that I think I could do well, and they’re usually very different from the stories that our writers could do well, because each of them has a different beat And they’re not interchangeable. I can’t take, I usually could not take Tom and give him a story that Jessica would do. I could not usually take Tobias, who’s our hardware guy, and have and give one of his stories to to Ian or so, who is, who does more general security pieces and other types of stuff. So each person has what they’re good at, and we try to take advantage of of what they’re good at, rather than just treating everyone the same. And so I have a narrow niche of things that I’m good at, that I’m good at reporting, and so I’m trying to bring that experience to The Register. When I write a story, you know, like, what am I? What am I good at? What can I do? I’m good at doing hands on stuff. I’m good at doing reviews. I have a lot of experience with those things, but if you asked me to write about a security breach, I wouldn’t be able to do nearly as good a job as as our as our other writers do.
CB: And that’s what makes up a good team, right? I think that’s what we look for when building any kind of team. And I think all their reporters over at The Register are great in their own way, like you said.
AP: Right? Exactly. They’re, they’re good at different things and and so, you know, it’s what, what is everybody? What Is everybody good at? What are they passionate about? Everyone, should. It would be good if, I mean, obviously not every story can you feel like this is the most important thing that I’ve ever done, but it’s really good if you could find things that people are passionate about, because they’re going to do a better job and they’re going to explain it better. So when I’m looking for stories for myself to do, I look for things that I feel passionate about, that I’m interested in, and then, like, is this a story that fits The Register? Because obviously, we have a brand that we have to preserve and maintain and grow. We’ve got a very strong brand, which is awesome. A lot of our audience comes straight to the homepage, which is a rare thing in this day and age, where for a lot of people, particularly when I was working at Future, a lot of the traffic there, a lot of the sites there were drive by people. They found, found the sites through search, and it was kind of a lost weekend for them. They didn’t know where they had been, but they knew they got some information, right? We have a very strong audience, and we have to make sure that we’re doing things that the that is appropriate, that are appropriate for the audience. So, you know, it’s finding things that are passionate, that I’m passionate about, and are and are good for our audience.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, I know we have time for like one or two listener questions here. I’m sure you get pitched a lot, and you just kind of talked about understanding stories that would be a good fit for The Register. So tell us about a bit about how you prefer to be pitched and kind of what that process looks like.
AP: You know, I like, I like to be pitched things that are relevant to our to our audience. That may sound like really basic, but the amount of ridiculous pitches that I get today and I got at my old jobs is way outweighs the useful ones. I like. I really don’t mind. I got a really great pitch the other day, and I turned into a story that I really loved. So this was a, this is a great example of how how a pitch can work. And usually this is the kind of thing story that the kind of pitch I would get and say, “This person just wants attention.” But I got a pitch from a PR person, and they wanted to talk about whether or not it’s safe for businesses to use generative AI, whether you can get sued for using generative AI, whether your generative AI can violate copyright. Well, that’s something that I’ve been very interested in, whether generative AI is fair use, and whether it’s and whether it’s violating copyright. So she had this PR person, had a couple of lawyers that, I guess she was pitching out to try and have people interview. And at The Register, we do a lot of interviews, which is very different from my from my last job, my last job, we maybe have one or two sources, and we we run into a story really quickly here, we really try to get people on the record talking to us. We try to get quotes. And we try to get quotes from from many different sources, which is much better journalism. So this person was pitching me a couple of pitching me an idea, which is the kind of story that I would do, and they were pitching me resources like you could talk to these to these lawyers. Now, I looked at that and I said, this is a good this is a story I’d like to do, but I can’t do it just as a just using what the PR person wants me to, because then I’m just doing their job for them, right? So I said, I like this. I wrote the person back, and I said, I like this idea. I’d like to talk to your to your lawyers, and I’m going to do a story, but just so you know, I’m going to talk to a bunch of other people too. And so I reached out, I got someone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to talk to me, and I got another couple lawyers to talk to me, and pretty soon I it took me, like a week, but pretty soon I interviewed like six different people for a story on whether or not, whether or not you can get sued for for copyright violation by using generative AI. And the answer is yes, you can be sued, although a lot of lawyers feel like Disney’s more likely to sue The Journey than to sue you. Still, if you’re running a business and you use an image generator or use a text generator and you get Mickey Mouse. You can although Mickey Mouse is partial in the public domain now, so maybe that’s not a good example. You get Darth Vader. You can be sued. You can be sued for using that in your materials. So I went at now, because this is The Register I went looked at it from the company’s perspective from the, “Oh, a lot of companies are using AI, is there a risk if you use this on your corporate website? Is there a risk if this is your company logo, it is there? What is the risk for business?” Not what is the risk for the individual, per se? So, so the person gave me an idea that I could build on, build on, they gave me a resource that I can use to build on it, and and that was and they were very cooperative and helping me, you know, make appointments with those lawyers, etc. So I think, you know now I’m also open. We don’t do a ton of product coverage, but I’m also open to product pitches, but it has to be a product that would make sense for our enterprise IT audience. So if somebody is pitching me like I don’t know, I’ve gotten things like hair dressing equipment or whatever, like, no. But you know, a lot of PR people, just, a lot of PR people, just carpet bomb, carpet bomb you with pitches, and I understand that, but I do look at, I do look at everything that I get, because every now and again, there’s, every now and again, there’s a gem. Uh, yeah. So, you know, pitch me my you can give everyone my email address. I’m, I’m happy to get pitches from from PR people for stories that we could do, yeah, because we’re always looking for good stuff, and we’re always looking to be the first to report something, rather than being reactive to a trend
CB: Makes sense.
MF: Yeah, we’ll definitely, we’ll let our peers know, but we’ll definitely encourage them to be within your beat versus, you know, hair care products or something like that. Awesome. Well, I think we have time for one more listener question. This one’s a bit of a fun one. We’re just curious if there are any shows that you are watching in your free time?
AP: Sure. So I don’t have as much free time as I did at my old job because, because this keeps me, this The Register is keeping me kind of busy, yeah. But I really like British mysteries kind of take me away to a nice a nicer place. So I love Shetland. That’s one I strongly recommend. And and lately I’ve been watching Wednesday, but I’m sure everyone is watching Wednesday, so, so that’s not really much of a tip, but I it so happens that situation publishing, which is our, our corporate parent, is located in in London. The primary office is located in London. My old job, Future, the primary office was located in Bath.
CB: Okay.
AP: So I keep working with, I keep working with with British people,
CB: Yeah.
AP: and, but nobody sent me over there yet. So I have this great longing to to see shows that take place, that take place in the UK. So I have a Brit Box subscription and an Acorn subscription, and I love to to watch whatever mystery shows they have coming out. Highly recommend Shetland. Highly recommend McDonald & Dodds. That’s another good one. So, so, so there are a lot of wonderful British mysteries to watch, and I like to watch them because they kind of take me to the source of my jobs.
CB: That’s so fun to hear. And that’s like a total departure from, like, your day to day technical stuff. So I love that you watch UK focus shows that’s so cool.
AP: Yeah, I mean, when I watch shows like, I’ve really stayed away from a lot of the tech shows like Halt and Catch Fire or whatever I did watch Devs, because I don’t know, maybe it’s just, maybe it’s just too, too much I like, when I watch TV, I’m trying to, like, you know, escape a little bit.
CB: Yeah.
AP: So, so I don’t, I don’t do a lot of, like, in my, you know, if I’m going to do computing stuff in my spare time, which I do a lot, it’s going to be hands on.
MF: Yeah, that that makes total sense. Well, Avram, thank you so much for joining us on today’s show. This was a great conversation, and definitely, I know our viewers will really enjoy it. So appreciate your time.
AP: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.
CB: Yeah, we love hearing about your new role at The Register, and we’ll definitely be following a lot of your coverage.
AP: Well, thank you so much.
CB: Awesome. Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds to learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes. Please visit us at w2comm.com/podcast, and follow us on Twitter @MediaMindsShow and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.