Here in the US, we are deep into election season, and it is impossible to debate politics without also debating how technology is distorting it. There are the AI-generated deepfake images Donald Trump circulated of Taylor Swift appearing to endorse his campaign, as well as disproven conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines. And then there are the malicious disinformation campaigns on social media, which are coming from everywhere – with seemingly no solutions in sight.
The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center released a report charting a recent rise in fake activist and news websites, as well as fake accounts on social media, created by operatives in Russia, Iran and China. Generally, their goals are to create chaos during the election and exacerbate tensions over race, gender and other hot-button cultural issues.
On X, Elon Musk released a chatbot called Grok, which was spouting misinformation for several weeks about when to vote. Meanwhile, Meta, owner of Facebook, announced it has a solution to the political misinformation conundrum: its social platform Threads won’t “recommend” political content. This is akin to claiming one can remove butter from shortbread – it sounds like a healthy goal until you try to separate out what is “political” from everything else.
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I recently talked about all this at the National Book Festival in Washington DC on a panel with propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev. Our moderator asked us if the 2024 election is better or worse than the 2020 one in terms of misinformation and disinformation, with the latter being false information intended to deceive or mislead. It is a complicated question, because social media has changed so much since 2020.
I think people are more aware of online misinformation, but they are more confused by it than ever. Partly that is because the previous generation of social platforms is crumbling away, and the new ones have fragmented us into dozens of spaces. But in the US, this confusion is also engineered. Politicians have sued and hamstrung academic groups like the Stanford Internet Observatory in California, which tracked US election misinformation online in 2020. We know the propaganda is out there, but nobody is able to analyse it adequately.
Plus, as Pomerantsev said, it isn’t as if online disinformation will evaporate after the elections. Indeed, many people crave it. Propaganda makes us feel like we are part of a community, united against a common enemy. This insight is particularly profound when it comes to social media, which is also designed to make people feel like they are part of a community even when they are alone with their glowing screen.
We are at a weird historical juncture. Experts may understand why propaganda works, but no longer know how it reaches us on a technical level. When the military sent propaganda to adversaries in the past century, they loaded pamphlets into planes and dropped them behind enemy lines. It was pretty obvious where the information was coming from, and why. Today, companies hide the way false information rockets across their platforms. Their algorithms for surfacing content are secret, and so are the identities of many people posting. We don’t need better technology to solve our misinformation problems; we need transparency from the companies disseminating it. They should be honest about where the content in our feeds is coming from, because most of what we see is determined by algorithm, and comes from strangers we never opted to follow. If researchers knew how information got into our feeds, and how people respond to it, they might come up with tools that prevent dangerous lies from spreading.
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Still, there are non-technical solutions too. Bestselling author Rebecca Yarros, whose fantasy novel Fourth Wing is about a group of students at a war college for dragon riders, also spoke at the National Book Festival . As Yarros’s main character Violet gains more experience, she realises that the leaders of the college have been rewriting history books to justify a centuries-long war. In reality, her people started the war by colonising the group Violet once thought were the baddies.
Yarros explained that she wrote the book in part to protest US politicians who are removing references to slavery from history books. Many audience members thanked her for telling a story that debunked propaganda and was on the side of colonised people.
I walked around with a smile for a while afterwards. Partly it was the fizz of being in a real-life community, not one fabricated by propaganda. But it was more than that. Popular stories like Fourth Wing give me hope that the escape from propaganda can be just as compelling as the escape into it.
Annalee’s week
What I’m listening to
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The podcast Tested, by Rose Eveleth, about the history and science of sex testing at the Olympics (see review, page 30)
What I’m reading
Peter Pomerantsev’s How to Win an Information War, a tale of British psychological operations in the second world war
What I’m working on
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Learning about the history of biang biang noodles
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
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As time goes on, companies try to push the world toward this AI-powered Utopia we’re envisioning. Thus, more tasks that require human beings are being handed over to AI chatbots. As an example, T-Mobile is thinking of bringing AI-powered agents that will even be able to perform actions on your account.
T-Mobile wants your agents to be AI chatbots
In order to bring this, T-Mobile had to go to the King of AI, OpenAI. Right now, we don’t know too many specifics about this deal, but it seems pretty straightforward. T-Mobile wants to use OpenAI’s technology to make agents that are just AI chatbots communicating with the user. We’re not sure if customers will communicate with these chatbots over the phone or only through text.
This platform is called IntentCX. The agents will gain access to the customers’ account information so they’ll have important information about their accounts. So, if you need some troubleshooting done, you should be able to contact the bot to see what’s going on with your account.
Not only will the agent be able to see your account information, but they’ll even be able to make changes to your account. In order for them to do this, they’ll need to get the consent from the user. We don’t know what sort of changes the bots will be able to make; it’d make sense if there were some limits to what they can do.
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Right now, there’s not much information about these new bots. We know that we won’t see them this year, as T-Mobile plans to launch these next year. We’ll get more information about these chatbots as we get closer to the official launch.
We all know the issue with this
Obviously, there’s one blaring issue with this implementation. While we don’t know how T-Mobile plans to go about doing this, we have to wonder what’s going to happen to the human beings in T-Mobile’s call centers. If an AI bot is able to perform the tasks that people have been able to do, then we can foresee T-Mobile cutting staff left and right. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that… but this is a major corporation we’re talking about.
“Didier was the initial one – Chelsea is like one big family and we just sat and ate in the canteen with the players and so we started a conversation organically while eating,” says Menon.
“He asked what I can do for him, and I told him we can try this, and he asked me to try right away. That was the moment where football opened in front of me.
“After that Joe Cole, Frank Lampard, John Terry began coming to me to try it.
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“The medical department were fantastic and made me part of their team, despite being from a different discipline.”
Menon’s sessions involved meditation, sharpening players’ mental approach and dispelling the negative thoughts that can come with top-flight pressure and scrutiny.
“I was a person without a title, teaching the players self-care and how to balance, spiritually, emotionally, and ultimately impact them physically,” says Menon.
“They are human beings and need a friend to giggle with, babble to and then they will open up.
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“You need to be happy in the mind in sports and business. It’s the same – the mind is everything.”
Menon was a constant presence in the Chelsea backroom staff for 13 years, working under managers such as Carlo Ancelotti, Rafael Benitez, Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and, finally, Thomas Tuchel.
“I got the chance to be part of all the trophies Chelsea won from 2010,” he says.
“What an experience, it was an unbelievable space, I miss it a lot, frankly.”
Astronomer on Wednesday unveiled its latest data orchestration release, which includes support for DBT Labs’ open source platform and aims to provide customers with improved data pipeline performance and security.
Astro, the vendor’s suite for readying data for analysis, is built on Apache Airflow, an open source data orchestration tool that provides more than 1,600 integrations with databases, AI frameworks and other platforms key to developing AI and analytics models and applications and analyzing data.
By adding support for DBT Core, the open source version of the vendor’s data transformation platform, Astronomer is enabling customers to run Airflow and DBT together to enable improved data pipeline performance over running Airflow alone.
Data transformation is part of the overall orchestration process. While Airflow provides general-purpose capabilities for the entire orchestration process, DBT provides a specialized set of features that improve the transformation stage.
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As a result, the Astronomer Astro update adds a useful capability for the vendor’s users, according to Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy.
“Astronomer’s integration of DBT into their Astro platform is quite significant,” he said. “This integration means that the pipeline can be managed with a single set of tools rather than in parts. Now that Astro users can access these capabilities, they may be able to do more sophisticated and flexible data modeling within their pipelines.”
Based in New York City, Astronomer is a 2018 startup that specializes in helping customers manage data pipelines to ready their data for analysis.
To date, the data orchestration vendor has raised $282.9 million in financing, including $213 million in March 2022. This was just before funding for tech vendors tightened and tech stocks slid amid fears of a recession as well as worldwide events, such as the Russia-Ukraine War and repeated supply chain disruptions, causing economic uncertainty.
Problems such as data isolation, data duplication, incomplete data and incorrect data hamper data quality. Without high quality data, organizations can’t rely on their data to inform decisions. Until the last decade or so, when most data was kept in on-premises databases and real-time decision-making was a luxury, enterprises could address data quality over time and use data products such as weekly, monthly and quarterly reports.
Now, however, the speed of business moves faster than ever. Organizations must be able to act and react as events happen. In addition, the volume of data organizations collect is increasing exponentially, and the complexity of that data is also rising, making human oversight of data quality an impossibility.
In response, specialized vendors such as Astronomer, Acceldata, Monte Carlo and Rivery have emerged with AI-powered automation tools to help enterprises address data quality as they ready data to inform AI and analytics models and applications.
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While Acceldata and Monte Carlo address data quality by enabling users to automate data observability as data moves through pipelines, data orchestration vendors, including Astronomer and Rivery, enable customers to automate combining and organizing of data from disparate sources.
“The aim is to reduce data silos and give a unified view of data,” Farmer said. “However, automation also improves and reduces manual intervention, saving time and resources while, in theory, minimizing errors.”
As a result, data orchestration vendors such as Astronomer and Rivery address a real need as data volume and complexity increase and as real-time insights are needed, he added.
While Astronomer specializes in data orchestration, DBT Labs specializes in transforming data from one format, such as a database file or Excel spreadsheet, to another so it can be combined with other data to inform AI and analytics tools.
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Astronomer first added support for DBT Core to its support for Apache Airflow in 2023 in an open source package named Cosmos. The feature enables users to integrate DBT Core projects into Airflow with just a few lines of code.
Astronomer’s integration of DBT into their Astro platform is quite significant. This integration means that the pipeline can be managed with a single set of tools rather than in parts. Donald FarmerFounder and principal, TreeHive Strategy
Now, Astronomer is adding support for DBT Core in Astro. Users can manage DBT Core and Airflow from a single interface that uses the same code deploy process for two distinct platforms that otherwise don’t share the same code. The result is a reduction the context switching required by using Airflow and DBT Core in Cosmos, which adds to wasted time, and an experience designed to improve efficiency to speed decision-making.
While saving time is one benefit of support for DBT Core in Astro, its main benefit is the full integration of a set of tools that improve the overall data orchestration process by better preparing disparate data types to be combined, according to Stephen Catanzano, an analyst at TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group.
“The DBT integration is highly significant,” he said. “DBT has become a standard for data transformation. And combining it with Airflow’s orchestration capabilities creates a powerful and flexible data engineering stack. This integration simplifies complex data pipelines, improves collaboration and accelerates development cycles.”
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The impetus for combining Astronomer’s support for Airflow with support for DBT Core came largely from Astronomer’s customer feedback, according Julian LaNeve, the vendor’s CTO.
He noted that Astronomer has an integration with DBT Cloud, which is DBT Labs’ fully managed service, but that he has observed some DBT users migrating off Cloud and onto Core instead. Those Astronomer customers using Airflow and DBT Core together, therefore, asked for more seamless integration between the open source tools.”
“We’re at a point where we want to start making consolidation plays around making sure our customers can simplify their vendor relationships and run everything on one platform using the same infrastructure,” LaNeve said. “That was where the feedback from customers around DBT in particular was helpful.”
Customers told Astronomer that the pre-existing experience was “fine,” he continued, but that it could be better.
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Beyond adding support for DBT Core in Astro, Astronomer’s latest platform update includes the following features aimed at improving the data orchestration process:
Universal Metric Export, a tool that lets customers export metrics to Prometheus, an open source platform that, among other capabilities, enables users to view metrics across the various platforms that make up their data stack so they can take proactive measures to ensure the health of their data.
Self-Healing Workers, a feature that monitors Airflow infrastructures to find and stop idle processes so systems aren’t running unnecessarily.
Astro Terraform Provider to simplify managing Airflow infrastructures by using HashiCorp’s Terraform infrastructure management capabilities to automate tasks to ensure consistent, scalable deployments.
Customer Managed Workload Identity on AWS, a feature that enables governed access to AWS data services to improve security and compliance. Astronomer provides similar governance tools for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
While the efficacy of the new features depends on how well they’re developed, Self-Healing Workers and Universal Metric Export hold promise, according to Farmer.
“The pipeline resilience features are promising,” he said. “Self-Healing Workers, if well implemented, could address a joint irritation for Airflow users by managing idle processes and stuck tasks. Similarly, the Universal Metrics Export solves an irritation but should also be very valuable for organizations optimizing large and complex orchestrations.”
“Universal Metrics Export provides essential visibility into data pipelines, enabling proactive monitoring and troubleshooting, [while] Self-Healing Workers enhances pipeline resilience,” he said.
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LaNeve, meanwhile, pointed to Astro Terraform Provider as a significant addition, noting that Terraform is gaining popularity with large enterprises deploying the infrastructure management capabilities to standardize code across different departments.
“It’s something our customers have been asking for,” he said.
Customer feedback provided the motivation for developing most of the new Astro features, LaNeve continued. The exception is Self-Healing Workers, which resulted from Astronomer’s attempt find ways to proactively help users.
Looking ahead
As Astronomer evolves, one of its goals is to add support for more tools such as DBT Core that enable customers to use specialized tools to augment Airflow’s general-purpose data orchestration capabilities, according to LaNeve.
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“As our customers give more feedback around where they want us to step in and help, we’ll pay active attention and continue to look for opportunities,” he said.
The vendor holds a lot of telemetry data based on its customers’ use of Astro. That telemetry data provides insight into data reliability that can be used to help Astronomer develop data observability capabilities.
“Today, we give users the operations to make sure everything runs on time,” LaNeve said. “In the future, we want to give you the observability to build trust and confidence.”
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Catanzano noted that Astronomer’s plan to support additional tools through integrations is a sound strategy. In addition, advanced analytics, machine learning and improved collaboration capabilities all are areas in which the vendor could expand beyond data orchestration, he said.
Farmer, meanwhile, suggested that Astronomer focus on upgrading its tools to better handle the scale and complexity of enterprise deployments. For example, the startup vendor could add advanced compliance and policy management tools, more data governance capabilities and multi-region support.
“They must improve enterprise-level support for large-scale, complex … environments,” Farmer said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
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Matchday debuted its new soccer digital card game Matchday Champions in early access today on iOS and Android.
Today, the game is in early access globally, and it is celebrating with the limited-time “Copa Alexia x Céline,” a unique in-game tournament hosted by Spanish football World Cup Champion Alexia Putellas, and the popular Belgian influencer Celine Dept.
Backed by Lionel Messi’s Play Time fund, Alexia Putellas, and other industry legends in sports and games, Matchday Champions said it has a one-of-its-kind experience. The game allows players to collect, craft and manage their own dream squad made up of both men’s and women’s players.
Sebastien de Halleux, Matchday chief gaming officer, said in a press briefing that the company is going after five billion soccer (or, rather, “football”) fans in the world. It sounds ambitious, but in a previous life, de Halleux and his previous cofounder Kristian Segerstrale sold their social gaming company Playfish to Electronic Arts for up to $400 million back in 2009.
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You can mix and match women and men in Matchday Champions.
“Why are we doing this? Well, football, or soccer, is a force that’s bringing more people together than ever before. It is really something that is absolutely universal,” de Halleux said. It’s mind boggling. It’s actually one billion more than the number two sport, which is Cricket. And the best part of this is that it is the growing the football audience is estimated to have grown to five billion.”
De Halleux said, “Of course, video games is also growing and there are about 2.5 billion people playing. What is the commonality between football and video games? Both football and video games are fueled by emotions, and that is really the genesis of Matchday.”
“Football is an emotional experience for its five billion fans worldwide, and now they will be able to experience the drama of the sport in a video game that can seamlessly simulate games based on real players, real stats, and more,” said de Halleux. “Few players have experienced the emotional highs of football like Alexia Putellas, winning a World Cup, three UEFA Women’s Champion Leagues, and 21 domestic trophies, along with all of her incredible individual accolades, so we’re honored that she has joined us not only as a Matchday ambassador but as the host of our first global in-game tournament.”
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Matchday Champions has big name supporters.
He said it delivers the excitement of football using a cutting edge narrative creation engine, ensuring no two matches are ever the same. More than two million people have already pre-registered ahead of launch. Matchday Champions is now available in early access globally for iOS and Android phones.
The goal was also to make a single game for men and women, so one of the characteristics is you can put men or women athletes on the same team. Licensed by FIFA, the game includes 65,000 men and women athletes.
Players who download the game can sign up to participate in the Copa Alexia x Céline, beginning on September 20. Hosted by World Cup champion, two-time Ballon d’Or winner and UEFA Women’s Player of the Year Alexia Putellas and influencer Celine Dept, a football mega-fan with more than 50 million followers on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, Copa Alexia x Céline challenges players to join Team Alexia or Team Celine, squaring off in a virtual tournament for bragging rights and prizes.
“Matchday is elevating two things I am very passionate about: women’s football and inclusivity,” said Putellas, in a statement. “Women’s football has been on the rise for the last decade and Matchday’s co-gender football squads represent this reality in a fun and novel way for fans. I am honored to be a part of and shape a (virtual) football world that gives men and women truly equal footing. I hope the sort of representation we see in Matchday’s games will inspire the women’s football stars and all football fans of tomorrow and help to drive forward conversations around equality.”
Licensed by FIFA and FIFPRO, Matchday offers fans the ability to collect digital player cards from tens of thousands of soccer athletes, and to combine both men’s and women’s players into their ideal squad to go head-to-head with other players’ teams. The FIFA license is interesting considering Electronic Arts dropped the license in favor of its EA Sports FC brand instead.
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How to play
Matchday Champions is in early access globally now.
Matchday players begin by assembling their squad, which they can start upgrading immediately. They then send their starting 11 onto the pitch, and Matchday Champions’ proprietary simulation engine renders exciting in-game narratives.
You can play against rivals and friends while earning resources and recruiting footballers to improve their squad. Matchday Champions authentically captures the euphoria and heartbreak of real life football, and every match unfolds in a unique way.
The game lets you craft your Dream Squad. Your are the manager of your fantasy squad, and you get to choose who goes onto your team. You can put men and women on the same squad. The cards evolve over time as you accummulate more XP in the matches. Real-life stats influence how well a player does in the card game. If that player gets injured, you will see the impact in the game. You can put players on the squad that will complement each other, and the strategy is fairly easy to grasp.
This game has an AI-powered engine, and it dissects the game into 10 or so moments which are narrated and in your local language, with a lot of passion. And then each action is actually displayed using the cards themselves. Each card has special tricks.
“We try to take users through the reality of football, which is to the highs and the lows, and try to really connect your choices as you are building your squad to what’s happening on the pitch with some recommendation in the post match report,” de Halleux said.
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Your goal is to lead your club to glory. You can play a game in two to five minutes. The game also has a lot of social elements. There’s a store that enables you to buy more cards, more packs, and a transfer window that highlights certain players during a week based on different events that are happening in the football season.
An accessible game
You can collect and trade players with Matchday Champions.
In Matchday Champions, players build and strengthen their squad, competing against others to move up through divisions and grow their club, competing with friends and Matchday’s vibrant global community, already numbering in the millions.
Custom squads can be set up with ease through Matchday Champions’ intuitive and accessible interface, allowing players to experiment with their team formation, as well as buy, sell and share cards with friends. Players hone their team in single player mode, then step on the pitch for a friendly match or an epic league competition with fans from all over the world. They can also join fans on the official Discord in discussing everything football, participate in weekly contests, participate in AMAs with football celebrities and follow real-world football matches.
Matchday continues to push the boundaries of digital ownership with Matchday Champions, which is part of a new category of sports games wherein fans build virtual squads by collecting digital cards of their favorite footballers. Players have true ownership of their cards and other digital items within Matchday Champions as they collect, trade and grow their dream team. These officially licensed cards can be utilized in all games within the Matchday ecosystem as it continues to grow.
Matchday previously launched the trivia and match prediction game Matchday Challenge: FIFA Women’s World Cup AU∙NZ∙2023 Edition, which ran during FIFA Women’s World Cup and was played by millions of players all over the world.
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Matchday is incubated by Leo Messi’s Play Time and backed by leading investors, with teams in San Francisco and Barcelona.
De Halleux said that the company’s values including building distinctive soccer games, driven by people who are passionate about video games and soccer. They also focused on making the game “charmingly playful.” It’s not a hardcore game.
“We wanted to bring this joy back into the adult game. It’s about fantasy. It’s about having fun. We wanted the love of football, the love of game, to really shine through the experience. We wanted authenticity, which is really important.”
In addition to using licensed FIFA player likenesses, the team also used modern AI tools. The entire game engine is infused with AI. It’s also embracing Web3.
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“We wanted to treat our gamers as true fans, and when they get to match the card, we wanted to put forward the concept of ownership, that all players own their cards forever,” he said.
He showed a demo of the gameplay where players like Messi square off against a goalie on a penalty kick. There’s some dramatic cheering and then the result of the penalty kick shows. There are animated scenes but it’s not a 3D or 2D action game.
“The esthetic is delightfully crafted and charmingly playful. And we are very, very proud about how this game looks and feel. We think it’s a completely different experience for football fans, one that they have not been able to experience before,” de Halleux said.
Messi incubated the idea and became an early investor and ambassador for the game through his fund called Playtime. The team is split across 22 countries.
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Compared to rival hardcore soccer games, de Halleux said the “difference is that we are trying to address an audience that is not playing those games. We are trying to address an audience who is already passionate about football but isn’t hasn’t found the right casual football game that they can connect with.”
The company is a FIFA official licensed partner. The company previously launched a game that was available only for two weeks during the Women’s World Cup, and it was played by over two million people. It was called Matchday Challenge.
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