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Last week, a TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI voice-emulating technology to make a song that sounded like a collaboration between the artists Drake and The Weeknd. The result was surprisingly non-awful. The track blew up on social media, generating hundreds of thousands of listens, before several platforms took it down at the request of the Universal Music Group.

Naturally, the AI song triggered a spasm of panicked hermeneutics: What did this strange achievement in synthetic art mean?

Some observers took things in a dystopian direction. It didn’t take much to imagine a near future where fake songs and real songs intermingled, where, for every authentic Taylor Swift track, the internet was replete with hundreds, thousands, even millions of plausible Taylor Swift knockoffs. Inundated by AI, pop culture would descend into a disinformation hellscape.

Alternatively, one could lean into optimism. Ghostwriter (probably) isn’t one of the great musical geniuses of the world, yet here he had produced something catchy. If anonymous internet users can make bangers in their basement using AI, what does that mean for actual hitmakers? Researchers studying the introduction of AI in the game Go have found that the rise of superhuman machines has “improved human decision-making” as the top players have learned to incorporate the novel strategies of AI to become more creative players. Similarly, one could imagine the best songwriters in the world honing their skills with a superhuman co-writer.

But lately I’ve become a little bored by the utopia-dystopia dichotomy of the AI debate. What if writing a song and dubbing in celebrity voices doesn’t clearly point us toward a disinformation hellscape or a heaven of music-writing creativity? What if the ability to send media that make you sound like a celebrity to your friends is, fundamentally, just kind of neat? As the tech writer Ben Thompson has pointed out, artists like Grimes and Drake could stand to make a lot of money if they sold licenses of their AI-generated voices and let their fans share little songs with one another, provided that any money made from the music would be split between the original artist and the user. Sure, you might get some surprise bangers. But mostly, you’d get a lot of teenagers recording high-school gossip in the style and voice of Drake. That’s not dystopian or utopian. That’s just the latest funny way to waste time.

The time-wasting potential of AI has been on my mind recently, in no small part because my wife told me, in less-than-subtle terms: You are wasting too much time on AI. Midjourney, a program that turns written prompts into sumptuous images, has colonized my downtime and—don’t read this part, boss—my work time as well. I have successfully used it to “imagine” daguerreotypes of historical figures playing pickleball. I gave it an image of my living room and asked it to redecorate. I designed a series of beds in the style of Apple, Ferrari, and Picasso. Then I realized I could drop in URLs of online photos of my friends and ask the AI to render them as funny versions of themselves—my wife as a Pixar character, my best friend as a grizzled athlete, my neighbor as a regal centaur. After a week or so imagining alternate careers as a furniture designer or interior decorator, I settled on using Midjourney to make my friends laugh. Midjourney is glorious, yes; among other things, it is a glorious waste of time.

One might make similar observations about ChatGPT. It’s already co-writing code with software programmers, accelerating basic research, and formatting and writing papers, but I’m mostly playing around with it, like an open-ended textual video game. ChatGPT went viral last year, to the surprise of its founders at OpenAI, not only because tens of millions of people got a glimpse of the end of white-collar work but also because it’s an extraordinarily interesting game to test the limits of synthetic conversation. When you see screenshots of ChatGPT’s output on Instagram and Twitter, what you are watching is people wasting time amusingly.

Economists have a tendency to analyze new tech by imagining how it will immediately add to productivity and gross domestic product. What’s harder to model is the way that new technology—especially communications technology—might simultaneously save time and waste time, making us, paradoxically, both more and less productive. I used my laptop to research and write this article, and to procrastinate the writing of this article. The smartphone’s productivity-enhancing potential is obvious, and so is its productivity-destroying potential: The typical 20-something spends roughly seven hours a day on their phone, including more than five hours on social media, watching videos, or gaming.

We overlook the long-range importance of time-wasting technology in several ways. In 1994, the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer studied how various 20th-century technologies had spread among households. They concluded that “time using” technologies (for example, TV and radio) diffused faster than “time saving” technologies (vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines).

The reasons weren’t entirely clear. But Bowden and Offer’s most interesting explanation is that economists and technologists overrate how desperately people want to not be bored. Consumers will go to great lengths to escape the psychic burdens of sensory inactivity. Mid-century buyers got a radio, then a black-and-white TV, then a color TV, then a speaker system, then a VCR, and so on, sending an unmistakable signal to the producers of these machines that they had a nearly infinite demand for “higher doses of arousal per unit of time.”

To see AI as play, or as a distraction, or as a waste of time is not to say that AI will be entirely unproductive or benign. It’s to imagine, rather, that the AI-inflected future contains more texture than mere utopia or dystopia. In Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, the science and technology writer Steven Johnson says that “when human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.” For example, the song sheets for self-playing pianos were essentially code for automatons. These code sheets helped establish the modern software industry. Rather than see games and work as opposites, we might try to see them as complements. The way we play with AI today might affect the way we work in ways that are impossible to anticipate.

In the utopia-dystopia dichotomy, advanced AI saves the world with scientific breakthroughs and fabulous wealth until the moment it destroys the world. The future goes: gold, gold, gold, death. Well, maybe. But if the past is any indication, the roads to gold and death will be paved with play and pockmarked with distractions. AI will waste a billion hours before it saves a billion hours. Before it kills us all, it will kill a lot of time.

Even as the whole of Silicon Valley grapples with historic inflation, a bank crash, and mass layoffs, Google’s woes stand apart. The explosion of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence more broadly has produced something of an existential crisis for the company, a “code red” moment for the business. “Am I concerned? Yes,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, told The New York Times. But Google employees are encountering another problem: “They took away the dried mango,” says a project manager at Google’s San Francisco office, whom I agreed not to name to protect the employee from reprisal. At least at that office, the project manager said, workers are seeing less of long-cherished food items—not just the mango, but also the Maui-onion chips and the fun-size bags of M&Ms.

Cost-cutting measures have gutted some of Google’s famous perks. In a company-wide email last month, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat announced rollbacks on certain in-office amenities, including company-sponsored fitness classes, massages, and the availability of so-called microkitchens: pantries stocked with everything from low-calorie pork rinds to spicy Brazilian flower buds. These perks have long been an inextricable part of Google’s culture, even in an industry flush with nap pods and coffee bars—a way to recruit top talent and keep coders happy during long days in the office. “The idea was ‘We’re going to make it so wonderful to be here that you never need to leave,’” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “Are they giving up on that idea?”

Google told me they’re still committed to perks, and indeed, the free meals are still around. “As we’ve consistently said, we set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and will continue that into the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said in an email. But the cutbacks are seemingly coming at an inopportune time: If there was ever a moment when Google needed to recruit top talent, it’s now. Although overall demand for software engineers has slowed, money and jobs are still flocking to a buzzy new breed of generative AI. OpenAI, after all, makes a point of matching Google’s daily meals and handing out “fresh-baked cookies.” Google’s new attitude toward perks may be an admission of what was true all along: Perks are perks—just expendable add-ons. They’re nice to have in the good times but hardly essential in the bad.

The world of HR has long claimed that happy workers are productive workers, but Google treated that idea like a mantra, creating offices that were less like cubicle-packed grids and more like adult playgrounds (complete with in-office slides and rock-climbing walls). As part of what the company refers to as “Googley extras,” it has given employees free yoga and pilates classes, fully comped team trips, and even once-a-week eyebrow shaping. Other big companies, and even start-ups flush with venture-capital cash, realized that to have a shot at competing for talent, they’d need to start subsidizing the same sort of lifestyle. Massages and macchiatos were just the start: Apple has hosted private concerts with artists such as Stevie Wonder and Maroon 5; Dropcam, a start-up Google bought in 2014 (whose tech it has recently decided to phase out), reportedly offered each employee a free helicopter ride, piloted by the CEO, to a destination of their choosing. Others, such as WeWork, simply handed out tequila around the clock.

The Googley extras aren’t gone, by any means, but they’re no longer guaranteed. Google’s infamous shuttle buses, known to clog San Francisco streets as they ferry employees to and from the office, are running less frequently, and traditional laptops have become a privilege reserved for employees in engineering roles. Everyone else must now make do with slightly wimpier netbooks. Part of this reduction in amenities has to do with the new reality of hybrid work, which has itself become a perk. It makes sense to trim the shuttle-bus schedule if fewer people are taking the bus to work every day. Same goes for the reported reduction in in-office muffins, although understanding the rationale behind the crackdown doesn’t necessarily make it sting any less.

It’s not just Google, either. “My sense is that [perks] are being pulled back broadly,” Cappelli said. “So many public companies feel that they have to look like they’re belt-tightening for investors.” After just a year, Salesforce has abandoned its “Trailblazer Ranch,” a 75-acre retreat meant to host guided nature walks, group cooking classes, sessions for meditation, and “art journaling.” Over at Meta, already a year out from its decision to cancel free laundry and dry-cleaning services, employees are expressing similar frustrations over snacks.

Still, it all cuts a little deeper at Google. That’s in part because Google has taken such care to cement its reputation as the best place in the world to work, the plushest employer in a sea of plush. As any Google employee will insist, the lunches were never as good at Apple or Microsoft. The message is perhaps symbolic as much as practical. Muffins are not a real financial concern for Alphabet, Google’s $1.3 trillion parent company, which could very much still cash in on the new AI boom. But for the company’s workers, it’s not the muffins themselves, but their absence, that may end up having the greatest impact. “The way it is conveyed to people matters as much as the perks themselves,” Cappelli said. If an abundance of perks signals care and intention, what might a lack of perks represent? “You’re sending the opposite signal: ‘We don’t really care about you so much, and that’s why we’re taking it away.’”

Flashy perks helped produce an illusion of safety that couldn’t last. Surface-level penny-pinching is ultimately about assuring investors that costs are under control; employees’ annoyance is just part of the bargain. You’ll know your employer really means business when it lays off your whole team. And if Google is willing to cut down on some of its most visible perks just as generative AI threatens to upend its business, then maybe it’s not too concerned about OpenAI outdoing it in the snack department. The end of muffins and dried-mango slices amounts to a gesture more than anything else—a way of reminding current employees that these are lean times, and they should start acting like it.

This week, US technology giant Apple also opened its first two retail outlets in the country.

Montana is on its way to becoming the first state to ban TikTok, which, according to one computer-security expert, is a little like saying it’s the first state to allow humans to flap their arms and fly around in the clouds without an airplane. The move is notable, but that doesn’t make it feasible.

“Why is a law saying that you can fly stupid? Because you can’t fly,” Bruce Schneier, a fellow and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, explained to me. “Why can’t you fly? Because you’re not built for flying.” Just like the human body is not designed to keep itself airborne, Schneier told me, the American internet is not constructed in such a way that a ban like the one passed in Montana last Friday could be realistically implemented.

And yet that bill is just one signature, or five days, away from becoming law. The legislation targets app stores and TikTok itself, rather than individuals, imposing a $10,000 daily fine for each time a user “accesses tiktok, is offered the ability to access tiktok, or is offered the ability to download tiktok.” The fate of the proposal, which would take effect in January 2024, now lies with Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, who can veto it, sign it, or do nothing—and if he does nothing, it eventually becomes law automatically. A representative for Gianforte did not respond to an email request for comment on what he plans to do.

But it may not matter. Experts I talked with viewed the law as more bluster than substance—a nonsense bill, if you will, best understood as a show of grievance rather than serious, practical legislation. Some doubted that we will actually ever see a world in which driving from Wyoming to Montana means watching TikTok and all its dancing teens suddenly evaporate from one’s app store. But that doesn’t mean the bill’s attempted implementation won’t have real-world consequences, and it certainly marks an escalation in the ongoing political fight over the app’s future.

[Read: TikTok is too popular to ban]

In a statement, TikTok challenged the legislation’s validity. “The bill’s champions have admitted that they have no feasible plan for operationalizing this attempt to censor American voices and that the bill’s constitutionality will be decided by the courts,” Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson, said in a statement. Google and Apple, which own the biggest mobile-app stores, did not respond to requests for comment, but, according to The New York Times, a trade group funded by the companies has said that they lack the ability to block downloads in a single state.

“I rarely see a bill that is this technically stupid,” Tarah Wheeler, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Red Queen Dynamics and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. The internet does not recognize the state of Montana, Wheeler explained, making it impossible to geofence in any meaningful, legally enforceable way. Everyone has an IP address that ties their internet connection to a given location, but these are imprecise, and easily thwarted by a VPN—not the kind of thing that definitively proves a digital act took place at a given physical location. The address is also determined by your internet-service provider, not the company behind your phone’s app store, and can change dynamically for a variety of reasons. (My editor is in New York, and when he checked the location associated with his IP address this morning, it showed up in Virginia.)

There are ways for your location to be pegged to your digital identity. Many data sources on your phone—GPS signals, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks, and the pinging of nearby cell towers—can be used to estimate your whereabouts, sometimes with startling precision. Different shows and movies are offered by streaming platforms such as Netflix depending on which country you’re in (an instance where the general locations offered by IP addresses are precise enough), and gambling sites will lock you out if you manually enter a zip code where their services are illegal. But none of these examples demonstrate how an app store could prevent users in a given state from accessing one specific app.

Either the legislators passing the bill simply didn’t understand the technology, Wheeler argued, or they broke an old military adage: “Don’t give an order you know can’t be followed.” To actually implement something like this effectively—feel free to enjoy the irony here—America would need to have an internet structured and governed more like China’s, with a mass-surveillance infrastructure built in.

Even if there were a way to build a perfect digital fence around the state of Montana and keep TikTok out of it, legislators may still lack the authority to do what they’re aiming for here. This bill, should it become law, is likely to be challenged in the courts on constitutional grounds. “I know it’s ridiculous to say that 15-year-olds lip-synching is protected speech, but that’s the Constitution,” James Andrew Lewis, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.

Still, a nonsense bill could have political ramifications if it forces judges to rule on it and set legal precedents in the process. Say the Montana law goes through and is indeed challenged by a lawsuit. If such a lawsuit makes its way to the Supreme Court, it will join a number of cases currently sitting before the bench that, depending on how the justices decide them, “could fundamentally rewrite the internet itself,” Rose Jackson, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative, told me.

[Read: The Supreme Court actually understands the internet]

Jackson sees the Montana bill as the continuation of a larger trend, wherein states are trying to fill a void created by inaction at the federal level when it comes to setting standards for “how we govern our technology ecosystem.” Angst is building up, triggering good-faith, bad-faith, and regardless-of-faith-questionable attempts to fill the gap. Discussions of a TikTok ban, both in Montana and nationally, trouble Jackson because of how much they undermine our current conception of an open web. Usually, the U.S. criticizes governments who take this approach to the internet. “It plays into what to this point has been a Chinese interest in reopening debate around a shared, open, interoperable, free, secure internet,” she said.

The anxieties exposed by all this hand-wringing over TikTok, as many have pointed out, are bigger than just one company. The case raises fundamental questions around privacy, data collection, algorithmic transparency, and national security, as well as the government’s role in regulating them. As Jackson noted, those concerned about the data TikTok is collecting on Americans should also be concerned that the Chinese government “could just go buy much of that same information legally from data brokers,” who in turn obtained it from U.S. companies. Privacy advocates have pushed for the country to consider comprehensive legislation rather than target TikTok specifically. Or what one might call a no-nonsense approach.

CEO Tim Cook personally welcomed customers to the new Apple store in Mumbai as the tech company opens its first retail stores in India. CNN's Vedika Sud reports.

The Apple CEO greeted customers who visited the store and posed for selfies with some of them.

The song, which cloned the stars' voices, is removed from streaming platforms after a copyright claim.

After a long wait, India today (April 18) got its first Apple store.

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Opening underscores the tech firm's increasing focus on India as key market and alternative manufacturing hub to China.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the home of Apple, Google, and Meta, but its grip on the technology sector’s future is arguably weakening. Though it remains the single biggest region for US deals involving venture capital, the area’s share of these deals has been on the decline and now stands at 18.6%, according to …

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