Reviews, the world is quietly being reshaped by machine learning. We no longer need to teach computers how to perform complex tasks like image recognition or text translation: instead, we build systems that let them learn how to do it themselves.

“It’s not magic,” says Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google. “It’s just a tool. But it’s a really important tool.”

The most powerful form of machine learning being used today, called “deep learning”, builds a complex mathematical structure called a neural network based on vast quantities of data. Designed to be analogous to how a human brain works, neural networks themselves were first described in the 1930s. But it’s only in the last three or four years that computers have become powerful enough to use them effectively.

Corrado says he thinks it is as big a change for tech as the internet was. “Before internet technologies, if you worked in computer science, networking was some weird thing that weirdos did. And now everyone, regardless of whether they’re an engineer or a software developer or a product designer or a CEO understands how internet connectivity shapes their product, shapes the market, what they could possibly build.”

He says that same kind of transformation is going to happen with machine learning. “It ends up being something that everybody can do a little of. They don’t have to do the detailed things, but they need to understand ‘well, wait a minute, maybe we could do this if we had data to learn from.’”

Google’s own implementation of the idea, an open-source software suite called TensorFlow, was built from the ground up to be useable by both the researchers at the company attempting to understand the powerful models they create, as well as the engineers who are already taking them, bottling them up, and using them to categorise photos or let people search with their voice.

Machine learning is still a complex beast. Away from simplified playgrounds, there’s not much you can do with neural networks yourself unless you have a strong background in coding. But I wanted to put Conrado’s claims to the test: if machine learning will be something “everybody can do a little of” in the future, how close is it to that today? You can check out fact of life to learn more

One of the nice things about the machine learning community right now is how open it is to sharing ideas and research. When Google made TensorFlow open to anyone to use, it wrote: “By sharing what we believe to be one of the best machine learning toolboxes in the world, we hope to create an open standard for exchanging research ideas and putting machine learning in products”. And it’s not alone in that: every major machine learning implementation is available for free to use and modify, meaning it’s possible to set up a simple machine intelligence with nothing more than a laptop and a web connection.

Which is what I did.

Following the lead of writer and technologist Robin Sloan, I trained a simple neural network on 119mb of Guardian leader columns. It wasn’t easy. Even with a detailed readme, it took me a few hours to set up a computer to the point where it could start learning from the corpus of text. And once it reached that point, I realised I had vastly underrated the amount of time it takes for a machine to learn. After running the training software for 30 minutes, and getting around 1% of the way through, I realised I would need a much faster computer.

So I spent another few hours configuring a server on Amazon’s cloud to do the learning for me. It cost $.70 an hour, but meant that the whole thing was done in about 8 hours.

I’m not the only one to play around with the technology. Quietly, starting a few years ago, Google itself has undergone a metamorphosis. The search giant has torn out the guts of some of its biggest services, from image search to voice recognition, and recreated them from the ground up. Now, it wants the rest of the world to follow suit.

On 16 June, it announced that it was opening a dedicated Machine Learning group in its Zurich engineering office, the largest collection of Google developers outside of the US, to lead research into three areas: machine intelligence, natural language processing, and machine perception. That is, building systems that can think, listen, and see.

But while computer scientists know enough about how to wrangle neural networks to use them to identify speech or create psychedelic images, they don’t really know all there is to know about how they actually work. They sort of just … do. Part of the job of Google DeepMind, the research arm which most famously led an algorithm to victory over a world champion in the ancient Asian board game Go, is to work out a little bit more about why and how they are so good. And the new machine learning group is straddling the line between research and product development, attempting to build new algorithms that can tackle unprecedented challenges.

My own attempt to do the same didn’t go so well. The results were … not perfect. While Google’s machine learning demonstrations involve solving problems which were described as “virtually impossible” just two years ago, mine could barely string a sentence together.

Following Sloan’s example, I set my model up to run as an autocomplete engine. I could write the first half-sentance of a theoretical Guardian editorial, and the system gets fed it as an input and asked what it thinks will come next. Don’t like that? Ask it for another response.

I tried to use it to read Guardian editorials from a parallel universe. I used “Thursday’s momentous vote to stay in the EU was” as the seed, and tried to get the system to imagine what the rest of the sentence would look like:

• Thursday’s momentous vote to stay in the EU was more contracts in the 1970s.
• Thursday’s momentous vote to stay in the EU was a man of a legal opposition in 2015.
• Thursday’s momentous vote to stay in the EU was the discrimination and the first way the failure to declare the government is not a single constitutional conservative policy.
• Thursday’s momentous vote to stay in the EU was on the promise of the pronouncements.

It’s terrible. Of course it’s terrible: if I could train a machine to write a convincing Guardian editorial, or even a convincing sentence extract from a Guardian editorial, in two days by copying a readme and fiddling around with complex software which I don’t really understand even after having successfully used it, then my job would be much less secure than it is. Hell, everyone’s jobs would be much less secure than they are.

I’m not even the first to fall at this hurdle: the Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance tried a similar experiment, also using Sloan’s kit, earlier in June, but was hampered by the size of her corpus. Half a million words, the total quantity of her writing from the Atlantic, isn’t quite enough for a machine to learn from, but the 20m sitting in the Guardian’s archive of editorials is better. (I could have run the system on every story in the archive, but it learns better if there’s a consistent tone and style for it to emulate – something leader columns, which are all written in the voice of the paper, have).

While the results are unimpressive on the face of it, at the same time, however, they’re … kind of amazing. The specific package I used, called Torch-rnn, is designed for training character-level neural networks. That is, before it’s trained, it doesn’t even know the concept of a word, let alone have a specific vocabulary or understanding of English grammar.

Now, I have a model that knows all those things. And it taught itself with nothing more than a huge quantity of Guardian editorials.

It still can’t actually create meaning. That makes sense: a Guardian editorial has meaning in relation to the real world, not as a collection of words existing in its own right. And so to properly train a neural network to write one, you’d also have to feed in information about the world, and then you’ve got less of a weekend project and more of a startup pitch.

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So it’s not surprising to see the number of startup pitches that do involve “deep learning” skyrocket. My inbox has consistently seen one or two a day for the past year, from an “online personal styling service” which uses deep learning to match people to clothes, to a “knowledge discovery engine” which aims to beat Google at its own game.

Where the archetypal startup of 2008 was “x but on a phone” and the startup of 2014 was “uber but for x”, this year is the year of “doing x with machine learning”. And Google seems happy to be leading the way, not only with its own products, but also by making the tools which the rest of the ecosystem is relying on.

But why now? Corrado has an answer. “The maths for deep learning was done in the 1980s and 1990s… but until now, computers were too slow for us to understand that the math worked well.

“The fact that they’re getting faster and cheaper is part of what’s making this possible.” Right now, he says, doing machine learning yourself is like trying to go online by manually coding a TCP/IP stack.

But that’s going to change. It will get quicker, easier and more effective, and slowly move from something the engineers know about, to something the whole development team know about, then the whole tech industry, and then, eventually, everyone. And when it does, it’s going to change a lot else with it.

See more at here: video game reviews

Do you think you know everything about our canine companions animals for kids? Think again! Check out these 10 surprising facts about dogs.

1. Your dog is as smart as a 2-year-old toddler.

There’s a reason your tot and your pup get along so well: they speak the same language. Or at least, they likely understand roughly the same number of words and gestures — 250!

2. Dogs and cats both slurp water the same way.

This may be hard to believe since dogs are such messy drinkers, but just like cats, our canine friends bend the tip of their tongue and raise liquid in a column up to their mouths.

3. Your dog does have a sense of time — and misses you when you’re gone.

If you think your dog knows when it’s time for dinner or a walk, you’re right! Dogs pick up on our routines and habits, and they also sense how much time has passed. One study showed how dogs responded differently to their owners being gone for different lengths of time.

4. Your dog’s whiskers help him “see” in the dark.

Okay, it’s not quite night-vision or a super power, but those whiskers pick up on even subtle changes in air currents, fact of life providing your pup with information about the size, shape, and speed of things nearby. This allows your dog to better sense approaching dangers or prey — even at night.

5. Dogs only have sweat glands in their paws.

More specifically, they are found between their paw pads. That’s why it can help to wet the bottom of their feet on a hot day, and it’s also why dogs rely on panting as a means of cooling down.

6. On average, a dog’s mouth exerts 320 pounds of pressure.

The tests were done on a German shepherd, American pit bull terrier, and Rottweiler. In comparison, human beings exert 120 pounds, white sharks exert 600 pounds, and crocodiles exert a whopping 2,500 pounds! Dogs also have ten more adult teeth than humans — 42 versus 32.

7. Your one year-old pup is as physically mature as a 15-year-old human.

Of course, different breeds age a little differently. Large dogs age faster than small ones. You can get a more exact comparison for your dog using this nifty Dog Age Calculator.

8. Your dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 to 10 million times better than yours.

Depending on the breed, your dog has between 125 million to 300 million scent glands — compared to only 5 million for humans. And the part of your dog’s brain that controls smell is 40 times larger than yours — that’s true, even though the canine brain is much smaller than the human, relative to size. A human’s brain is about 1/40th of their body weight while a dog’s brain is only 1/125th. Don’t feel too smug, though — an ant’s brain is 1/7th its body weight.

9. Dogs can hear 4 times as far as humans.

Puppies may be born deaf, but they quickly surpass our hearing abilities. Dogs can also hear higher pitched sounds, detecting a frequency range of 67 to 45,000 hertz (cycles per second). The human range is from 64 to 23,000 hertz. In both dogs and humans, the upper end of hearing range decreases with age

10. Your dog can smell your feelings.

Your pup can pick up on subtle changes in your scent, fun facts about dogs which can help him figure out how you are feeling — such as by smelling your perspiration when you become nervous or fearful. It’s also likely how dogs can detect certain diseases or know that a household member is pregnant.

Fact of life, Is there a more unfashionable meal than the carvery? 1970s laughing stocks such as Arctic roll and chicken Kiev have been reinvented by chefs and rediscovered by food lovers, but the carvery resists any warm glow of nostalgia. It remains the butt of a joke, a restaurant experience that, in the way it seems to encapsulate the narrowness of small-town British life, has become a bleakly comic trope. Adrian Mole has found himself at Ye Olde Carvery in Frisby-on-the-Wreake confronted by “ye olde foode congealing behind the bar”. Under hypnosis, Alan Partridge fantasised about whisking Ursula Andress away to High Wycombe’s Moat House Hotel: “You’ll love it. It’s got a 24-hour carvery.”

We all know why the carvery’s reputation is languishing in this way. Carveries are everywhere in Britain – the all-you-can-eat £6.99 roast is a staple of the British high street – but, ever since the then catering giant Lyons first introduced a carvery at its Regent Palace Hotel in the 50s, this has been a race to the bottom. A revolutionary self-service meal, the carvery was always more about cutting staff costs than delivering pleasure. Subsequently, pubs across the country have energetically worked that bottom line with cheap meats and sloppy cooking. Think carvery and the image that comes to mind is one of overcooked joints left to dry out under hot lamps alongside soggy veg, cold, greasy roast potatoes and Yorkshires as lifeless as Egyptian papyrus. And possibly a few years older.

Which is all a bit sad. Or certainly a missed opportunity. Who would not like the idea of being able to stuff yourself (unless you’re banned for eating too much) on every potential element of a Sunday roast, mixing and matching meats with abandon, even if it is just turkey, gammon and beef? Plus, there is nothing inherently flawed about such catering. Carveries are often bad because the core ingredients are poor, and then everything is (over)cooked in advance for convenience. But with a little more thought and care it would be easy to produce a superior carvery: occasionally, you do hear of pubs trying to ramp up standards.

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There are couple of Les Routiers-approved pubs in the Midlands that cook their carvery joints in (ooooh, get them!) an Aga and, curiously, the south-west and Cornwall particularly seems to be a bit of a hotbed of next-level carvery action. The Norway Inn in Truro serves local venison, while the Lanhydrock Hotel offers a choice of five meats, including Cornish pork and lamb alongside “imaginatively” cooked vegetables.

However, the most ambitious attempt to redefine our perception of the carvery (and its cousin, the hog roast) will occur in July, when Carve opens in central London. A fast-food operation attempting to tap into our interest in high-protein diets, it will serve a choice of “impeccably sourced”, freshly carved meats in £6.95 “carvepots”. Meats such as roasted bacon, eight-hour cooked salt beef and smoked pork leg will be sliced over healthy salads and slaws. Combinations will include jerk-roasted turkey with coconut rice, black-eyed peas and Scotch bonnet relish or short-horn beef with roast cherry tomatoes, spelt, parsley and capers. Those will initially be served as set meals, but the long-term plan is to allow customers to mix ‘n’ match meats and sides. Founder Daniel Bear says:

"We can tell you the postcode of each and every joint, its husbandry, what it was fed on. Another point of difference is our insistence on sous-videing first, and other slow-roasting techniques which I’ve worked on with the chef, Mark Broadbent. It’s all going to be served very quickly, too. At lunch, we can serve up to 800 customers, so it’s all about speed. We’ll be roasting off the meats and as soon as they come out of the oven our guys will be carving them. The speed we’ll be going through them means they won’t have that chance to dry out on a hotplate. And there aren’t any roast potatoes or big, dry Yorkshire puddings. It’s all about superfood bases, top-quality meat and, hopefully, propelling British carvery into the 21st century."

So forward-thinking is Carve that this carvery will even be serving tofu. Would you love to see carvery revitalised? And where can we already get a great one?

See more: emperor penguin facts for kids

Reviews, don’t worry, Mark Zuckerberg: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. And as the richest millennial in the world, you can probably be confident that someone, somewhere, is after you.

Which is why it makes perfect sense that you’ve joined the growing number of people doing a little DIY hardware hacking, and disabling their computer’s webcam and microphone. Even if a sneaky hacker does manage to penetrate your security, they’re not going to be seeing you in your tighty whities.

Yes folks, Zuckerberg tapes over his webcam. The billionaire made the (accidental?) revelation in a Facebook post intended to promote Instagram reaching its latest milestone of half a billion monthly active users.

In the picture Zuckerberg posted, of himself framed by a cardboard Instagram UI (cute), his laptop is visible in the background. And as Christopher Olson pointed out, that laptop has some weird accoutrements:

(And yes, that really does seem to be his laptop. Gizmodo’s William Turton notesthat it’s the same desk the Face-boss gave a tour of on Facebook Live back in September.)

Thunderbird is an email client, for what it’s worth, which is made by Firefox creators Mozilla. Unlike Firefox, though, it’s never really taken off in the wider world, and development has rather stalled in the past five years.

Taping over the sensors and a particularly geeky mail client might seem paranoid. But to be fair to Zuckerberg, he’s not the only one taking a look at his webcam and wondering if it’s worth the risk.

Take the FBI’s director, James Comey: “I put a piece of tape over the camera because I saw somebody smarter than I am had a piece of tape over their camera.” The American digital rights group EFF sells webcam stickers, and told the Guardian’s Danny Yadron “people purchase these regularly”.

Even experts who don’t cover their cameras think they should. Why doesn’t Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University? “Because I’m an idiot,” he told Yadron.

“I have no excuse for not taking this seriously … but at the end of the day, I figure that seeing me naked would be punishment enough.”

While Zuckerberg probably does have any number of advanced persistent threats trying to break his digital security, normal people shouldn’t be too complacent either. Installing backdoors on compromised computers is a common way for some hackers to occupy their time.

According to a 2013 report in tech news site Ars Technica, sites such as Hack Forums contain threads full of people comparing and trading images of “slaves”, people whose computers they have broken into and taken control of. “One woman targeted by the California ‘sextortionist’ Luis Mijangos wouldn’t leave her dorm room for a week after Mijangos turned her laptop into a sophisticated bugging device,” Ars’ Nate Anderson wrote. “Mijangos began taunting her with information gleaned from offline conversations.”

Mac users, like Zuckerberg, can rest a bit easier: unlike most Windows laptops, the light next to a Mac’s webcam is controlled deeply in the hardware, and so it’s very hard to turn the webcam on without also turning on the warning light. Hard,but not impossible.

So should you copy Zuckerberg? Probably. It doesn’t hurt, most of the experts do it, and it could minimise damage – even if it’s just emotional – in the case of a catastrophic hack. But maybe don’t use Thunderbird. Some things are just too much hassle. 

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Fact of life, Australia has a diversity of bird life and one of the most fascinating birds is the large water bird, the Australian Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus).

The Australian Pelican is found across Australia and New Guinea on many inland and coastal waters but tends to avoid the very dry desert regions mainly located in the centre of the continent.

These pelicans also occur in Indonesia and sometimes in New Zealand and some Pacific Islands close to Australia. The Australian Pelican is the largest of the 8 species of Pelicans found worldwide.

Use the information below to find out more about the Australian Pelican’s characteristics, habitat, diet, behaviour and reproduction.

Australian Pelican Characteristics

Australian Pelicans are large shore birds who measure 1.6 – 1.9 metres (5.3 – 6.2 feet) in length and weigh 4 – 6.8 kilograms with some larger birds weighing up to 8.2 kilograms.

Australian pelicans have a very large wingspan of 2.5 – 3.4 metres (8.2 – 11.2 feet). Females are slightly smaller than males. Their plumage is white and their primary wing feathers are black and they have black markings on their tails.

The face of the Australian pelican is white and on the back of the head and part way down their neck is a streak of grey. The eyes are brown and yellow. Their legs and feet are blue-grey in colour and they have 4 webbed toes.

Australian pelicans have huge, pouched bills that are pale pink in colour. Their huge bill is the largest out of all birds in the world and measures 49 centimetres (19.5 inches) in length and can hold 9 – 13 litres of water. The bill has a small hook at the tip and are serrated inside to hold on to slippery fish. The bill is delicately built. The lower jaw consists of 2 thin and weak articulated bones from which the pouch hangs.

It may be hard to imagine such a bird as large as the pelican flying, but it can easily fly because it has an extremely lightweight skeleton which only weighs 10% of its total weight. Australian pelicans are very buoyant birds and do not sink under the water, however, pelicans do not have much waterproofing oil on the feathers and can therefore become wet and cold.

Australian Pelican Habitat

Australian Pelicans prefer large open water sources such as freshwater and salt lakes, rivers, swamps, lagoons, coastlines and other wetland biomes that do not have too much aquatic vegetation.

The water is the most important habitat to the pelicans and can be in a number of different surroundings such as grassland, forest, esturary mudflats as long as it have a plentiful supply of fish.

Australian Pelican Diet

The Australian Pelicans main diet is fish. However, plant facts they have also been know to eat small turtles, tadpoles, shrimp and other crustaceans. Pelicans drink by opening their bill to collect rainwater.

Australian Pelican Behaviour

Australian pelicans live in large flocks or colonies and will travel long distances in search of suitable water sources and breeding grounds.

Australian pelicans work together in cooperative groups when hunting for fish, herding their prey to shallow water where they can scoop up their dinner in their huge bills. A pelican’s bill and pouch play an important role in feeding. The bill is sensitive and this helps locate fish in cloudy muddy water.

Pelican groups can be extremely large, with some numbering over 1,000 birds. The groups drive the fish to a central position and then plunge their huge bills into the water, trapping the fish in their pounches. The water is then drained as the pelican presses the bill against its chest so all that remains is the fish. The fish is then manoeuvred so that it can easily be swallowed whole down the pelicans throat with a quick jolt of the head. The pouch can also be used as a net to catch food thrown by humans.

It is an amazing sight when pelicans take off for flight, skimming across the waters surface, flapping their enormous wings and lifting up into the air. Pelicans are not capable of sustained flapping flight but can soar remarkably at great heights and for very long distances, floating on the air thermals on which they depend. They can remain in the air for over 24 hours covering hundreds of kilometres. By moving from one thermal to the next, pelicans can travel long distances with very minimum effort, reaching air speeds of up to 56 kilometres per hour.

When landing, they descend from the sky towards the watery runway, gliding and coming to a halt with the help of its huge wings spread widely to act as brakes. It has been known for the Australian Pelican to soar at heights of up to 3,000 metres (3 kilometres).

Like many wading birds, pelicans are known to form ‘V’ formation when flying in large flocks.

The Australian pelicans vocalisation is a chesty rumbling or deep growling.

Australian Pelican Courtship Displays and Reproduction

The Australian pelican breeding season varies depending on season. It occurs in late Spring in southern Australia and in tropical regions during the Winter. Environmental conditions are important for breeding, particularly rainfall.

Pelicans are colonial breeders and gather in very large groups, some containing up to 40,000 individuals nesting on islands or secluded sandy shores.

Male pelicans perform courting rituals such as complex dancing in order to attract females. The males may also pick up small objects, like sticks or dry fish, which they toss in the air and catch again, repeating the display several times. Both male and female perform ‘pouch-rippling’ which involves clapping their bills shut several times a second and causing the pouches to ripple like a flag in a strong breeze.

The pelican’s bill and pouch change colour dramatically during courtship. The front half of the pouch becomes bright salmon pink, while the skin of the pouch in the throat area changes to metallic yellow. Parts of the top and base of the bill change to cobalt blue, and a black diagonal strip appears from the base to the tip. The colour change does not last long and usually subsides by the time incubation begins.

As the courtship array progresses, the males withdraw one by one. Finally, after pursuits on land, water or in the air, only a single male is left. The successful male is led to the nesting site by the female. Nests are shallow depressions or scrapes sometimes lined with grass, twigs and feathers.

The female pelican lays 1 – 3 chalky-white eggs which measure 93 x 57 millimetres and become soiled and scratched as incubation is performed on the parents feet. Both male and female take turns to incubate the eggs. After 32 – 37 days, the eggs hatch and the pelican chicks are born naked and blind. The first hatchling is always larger and is fed the most food by the parents. The smaller hatchling may starve and die because of this or even may be attacked by its larger sibling.

Pelican chicks are fed regurgitated liquid for the first 2 weeks obtained by thrusting their bills down the parent’s gullet and then for the next 2 months, they are fed small fish such as Goldfish or Carp and invertebrates. The young leave the nest after 28 days and join creches of up to 100 juveniles where they are cared for until they have learned to feed, fly and become independent.

The Australian Pelican matures and is able to breed at the age of 2 – 3 years. Their life span in the wild is between 10 and 25 years.

Australian Pelican Conservation Status

The Australian Pelican is classed as ‘Least Concern’ by the IUCN. One of the pelicans main problems is man and his fishing hooks which can tear the pelican’s pouch. Fishing lines are also a problem as the birds can become entangled in abandoned lines. See more fun news at here emperor penguin facts for kids

Up to 80% of us will get acne to some degree. A study of final-year medical students at Melbourne University found many believed that fatty and sugary foods were second only to stress in causing spots. As the researchers leading the study pointed out, these beliefs were not based on evidence. The same topic fun facts about dogs

Those silly medical students. Why didn’t they consult the British Association of Dermatologists’s patient leaflet that says there is “little evidence that any foods cause acne, such as chocolate and fast food”? Yet a new book by two dermatologists – Perfectly Clear: The Perfect Guide to Clear Skin – says that restricting refined processed carbohydrates (such as sugar, white flour and white pasta) can reduce acne. Research from the British Medical Journal also shows that a diet high in dairy, particularly skimmed milk, can increase severity of acne. Greasy foods in general? Not so much.

Acne is caused by oil-producing glands in the skin getting blocked, leading to blackheads, redness and spots with pus where bacteria infiltrate the area. Production of oil (sebum) is increased by sex hormones, hence the appearance of acne at adolescence. Acne is definitely not caused by dirty skin. However, diet may have a role, albeit a small one. So should you modify your diet if you get spots?

The solution

Milk may increase acne because cow feed includes sex hormones – these then stimulate sebum production and foster spot formation.

Since foods with a high glycemic index (HGI) – those that make blood glucose rise quickly – increase the release of sex hormones, it’s not clear why skimmed milk is a villain. Some researchers think that drinking it makes people eat more HGI foods than if they drank a fattier variety. Read more animals for kids

The evidence overall is still underwhelming; it is often gathered from small groups of people and is observational in nature, so cannot attribute cause. It also often relies on people remembering what they ate many years ago.

But non-western diets are said to keep populations free of acne – a study of Inuit in 1971 showed that only when they gave up their nomadic life and started eating refined sugar in settlements did they get spotty. Genetics, however, are also likely to play a role. The American Academy of Dermatologists now says “emerging data suggests that HGI diets may be associated with acne”. But it also says that the evidence is not strong enough to advise people to change their diets. Of course, you shouldn’t eat refined, processed carbohydrates anyway – because, regardless of spots, they make you fat and can give you diabetes. The students were right about stress, though – a study showed that exams caused flareups of acne. See more at video game reviews

Nine Inch Nails musician and Apple Music executive joins music industry’s debate over Google’s video service: ‘I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous’

Like new free games, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is the latest artist to join the music industry’s war of words with YouTube, attacking Google’s video service over the role it plays for musicians.

“I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous. It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that’s how they got that big,” said Reznor in an interview with Billboard.

Reznor was not speaking purely as an artist, however. He is also chief creative officer at Apple Music, the streaming service launched by Apple in 2015, which is one of the key rivals to YouTube in the digital music world.

“I think any free-tiered service is not fair. It’s making their numbers and getting them a big IPO and it is built on the back of my work and that of my peers. That’s how I feel about it. Strongly,” said Reznor, widening his criticism to other rivals like Spotify in the process.

YouTube has faced a barrage of criticism from musicians and music-industry bodies in 2016, as part of a campaign in the US and Europe to rework copyright legislation that grants the service “safe harbour” status when users upload copyrighted material without the permission of the rights owners.

Rightsholders have also argued that YouTube’s vast catalogue of free music could impede the growth of paid music-streaming subscription services like Apple Music and Spotify’s premium tier – important context to Reznor’s comments, given his role.

In its most recent public statement, following an open letter to Alphabet boss Larry Page from rock band Sixx:AM, YouTube indicated that the criticism is having an impact on the company’s plans.

“The voices of the artists are being heard, and we’re working through details with the labels and independent music organisations who directly manage the deals with us,” a spokesperson said.

“Having said that, YouTube has paid out over $3bn (£2.1bn) to the music industry, despite being a platform that caters to largely light music listeners who spend an average of one hour per month consuming music – far less than an average Spotify or Apple Music user. Any comparisons of revenue from these platforms are apples and oranges.”

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