Biden signs sweeping executive order regulating AI

November 1, 2023

President Joe Biden is directing the U.S. government to take a sweeping approach to artificial intelligence (AI) regulation—his most significant action yet to rein in an emerging technology that has sparked both concern and acclaim, reports Crain’s New York Business.

The lengthy executive order—released on Monday, October 30—sets new standards on security and privacy protections for AI, with far-reaching impacts on companies. Developers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will be directed to put powerful AI models through safety tests and submit results to the government before their public release.

The rule, which leverages the U.S. government’s position as a top customer for big tech companies, is designed to vet technology with potential national or economic security risks, along with health and safety. It will likely only apply to future systems—not those already on the market—a senior administration official said.

The initiative also creates infrastructure for watermarking standards for AI-generated content, such as audio or images, often referred to as “deepfakes.” The Commerce Department is being asked to help with the development of measures to counter public confusion about authentic content.

The administration’s action builds on voluntary commitments to securely deploy AI adopted by more than a dozen companies over the summer at the White House’s request; and its blueprint for an “AI Bill of Rights,” is a guide for safe development and use.

All 15 companies that signed on to those commitments, including Adobe and Salesforce, will join the president at a signing ceremony at the White House on Monday, along with members of Congress.

Biden’s directive precedes a trip by Vice President Kamala Harris and industry leaders to attend a U.K.-hosted summit about AI risks—giving her a U.S. plan to present on the world stage.

The United States set aside $1.6 billion in fiscal 2023 for AI—a number that’s expected to increase as the military releases more detail about its spending, according to Bloomberg Government data.

“This executive order sends a critical message: … AI used by the United States government will be responsible AI,” International Business Machines Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said in a statement.

Biden also called for guidance to be issued that safeguards Americans from algorithmic bias in housing, in government benefits programs, and by federal contractors.

The Justice Department warned in a January filing that companies that sell algorithms to screen potential tenants are liable under the Fair Housing Act if they discriminate against Black applicants. Biden directed the department to establish best practices for investigating and prosecuting such civil-rights violations related to AI, including in the criminal justice system.

The order also asks immigration officials to lessen visa requirements for overseas talent seeking to work at American AI companies.

While the administration is touting its latest actions as the government’s most robust advancement of AI regulation, Congress may go further.

Biden has called on lawmakers to pass privacy legislation, though he doesn’t yet have a position on how Congress should approach comprehensive regulation of AI, the administration official said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for America to spend at least $32 billion in the coming years to boost AI research and development.

Lawmakers have been holding briefings and meeting with tech representatives, including Meta Platforms’ Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, to better understand the technology before drafting legislation.

Research contact: @crainsny

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany