YouSaid · the spoken record

Addie Robertson

lines on the record: 55
first: 2024-02-29
most recent: 2024-02-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are a bunch of really hard technical issues. A lot of those issues are going to be irrelevant to people because so many people do not check even very obviously fake information because of a variety of reasons that do not have anything to do with it being undetectable as a fake. I think that trying to actually make yourself care about whether something is true is in a lot of ways a bigger, more important step than making sure that nothing false is capable of being produced. I think that's the place where huge numbers of people have fallen down and where huge numbers of people have fallen for things. And I think that while all of these other issues we've been talking about are incredibly important, this is just a big individual psychological thing that people can do on their own that does not come naturally to a lot of us.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've arrived at what I would describe as existential crisis. Many, many problems. One set of things that should clearly be illegal, which deepfake non-consensual pornography seems like it should clearly be illegal. Everything else seems kind of up for grabs. How should”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That raises really all the same questions that image-based AI raises. In some ways, it's probably going to be harder to detect and regulate against at a non-legal platform level because so much stuff is optimized for detecting images. And so in some ways, it's maybe even a thorny problem. And also, on the other hand, voice impersonation was a thing before this, that there were really good impersonators of celebrity voices. And so I think that that might be a technically harder problem to fix, but I think that the legal questions it raises are very similar.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we're talking about non internet systems like robocalls, then we actually have laws that aren't really even related to most of the things we've talked about. There is a rule called the TCPA that's an anti-Robocall law, basically, that says you cannot just bombard people with synthetic phone calls. And it was recently decided that, all right, should artificial voices there include voice cloning? Yes, obviously. So at this point, things like Robocall laws apply to AI. And so if you're going to try to get Joe Biden calling a bunch of people and telling them not to vote, that's something that just can be regulated under a very longstanding law.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spent a lot of time talking about the visual side of it. We're going to make deep fake images. Those images have real world harms, especially to young people, especially young women. In an election cycle, making it seem like Trump or Biden fell down the stairs could be very damaging. There's also the voice side of it, right? Having Joe Biden do AI-generated robocalls is a real problem, or convincing people on TikTok that Trump said something he didn't say is a real problem. Do any of these laws address that aspect of it?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When a new technology comes along, there are a large number of people who don't necessarily think about it in terms of the First Amendment or of speech protections where you're able to say, oh, well, this thing is just categorically different. We've never had technology like this before, the First Amendment shouldn't apply. I always hope we don't go there with the technology because I think that the problems that come from just blanket outlawing it tend to be really huge. Don't know. I think that we're still waiting to see how disruptive AI tech actually is. We're still waiting to see whether it is meaningfully different from something like Photoshop, even though it seems intuitively like it absolutely should be. But we're still waiting to see that play out.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing we constantly say here at the Verge is that copyright law is the only real law on the internet because it's the only speech regulation that everone just kind of accepts. Defamation law is not a speech regulation that everyone just accepts, that has boundaries, the cases go back and forth. The idea that there should be a federal right to likeness doesn't even exist yet. So that feels like it will be very controversial if it happens as a speech regulation. But at the heart of that is the First Amendment, right? People have such a strong belief in the First Amendment that saying the government should make a speech regulation even if something is really bad is an extraordinarily complicated and high barrier to cross. Do you see that changing in the context of AI?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Throwing the law against people who don't necessarily have the money to defend themselves. And in general, I'm cagey about trying to open up defamation law. But it is a place where at least you have a framework that people have spent a very long time talking about.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Defamation law has already come up with text based generative AI, where if something like ChatGPT tells a lie about you, are you allowed to say they're making things up about me I can sue? And I think the benefit of defamation law is that there is a really huge framework for hammering out when exactly something is an acceptable lie and when it's not that, all right, well, would a reasonable person believe that this thing is actually true or is this really obviously political commentary and hyperbole? I think that we're on at least more solid ground there than we are with just saying, all right, fine, you know what, just ban deepfakes. I do think that still defamation law is complicated and every time you open up defamation law, as Donald Trump has once suggested, you end up getting a situation where in a lot of cases it's very powerful people”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the likeness law approach to it, which has big problems of its own. Another approach we've heard about on decoder is rooted in defamation law. So Barack Obama was on decoder. He said there are different rules for public figures than 13-year-old girls. We're going to treat them differently. We should have different rules for what you can do with a public figure than teenagers. We should have different rules for what is clearly political commentary in satire versus cyberbullying. And then Senator Brian Schatz was recently on, and he said something similar. Is defamation where this goes, where it's, hey, you made a deep fake of me. Maybe it's my likeness, but you're actually defaming my character, and you did it on purpose. And that rises to the level of you knowingly telling a lie about me, and I can defamation law is what's going to punish you for this instead of some law about my likeness.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sexually explicit pictures of real people. And I think things like the No Fakes Act, I believe there's also something called the No AI Fraud Act. These are much broader. We just think that you shouldn't be able to fake images of people. And we're going to make some carve-outs there, but the fundamental idea is that we want to create a giant federal likeness law. And I think that's much riskier because that is much more a we start from a point of saying that you shouldn't be able to fake an image of someone without their permission and then we're going to create some opt-ins with some options where you're allowed to do it. And I think that raises so many more of these questions that do we really want to create a federal ban on being able to Create a fictionalized image of somebody.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two bills are a little bit the thing I talked about where one of them, the Defiance Act, is really specifically about we want to look at non-consensual pornographic images. We define what that means, and we think that this particular thing we can carve out. There are lots of questions about in general how far you want to go in banning synthetic images, but it's really targeting.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, Amy Klobichar, Tom Tillis. And then after the Taylor Swift situation on X, there's something called the Defiance Act, which stands for the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images in Non-Consensual Edits Act, which is quite a lot of words. Do they go towards solving the problem? Do you see differences there? Do you see them as being an effective approach?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back talking with reg policy editor Addie Robertson about why it's really hard to limit either the creation or sharing of Deepfakes. That's the philosophical policy debate. You want to restrict this because in many cases it can be used to very bad things. There's some things that we absolutely want to forbid. But if we let that get too wide, we're going to start running into people's everyday speech. We're going to start running into absolutely constitutionally protected speech like documentaries, like news reporting, that's pretty blurry. And I think the audience here, you should sit with that because that is pretty blurry. On the flip side, there are two bills in Congress right now that purport restrictions on this stuff. There's something called the no-fly.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in that case, it's doing something I actually did, but AI generated images raise the whole other question, which is, okay, so where do you draw the line between an AI generated image and a Photoshop of someone and a drawing of someone? Should you not be able to depict any person in a situation that they don't want to be depicted in, even if that situation is something that would just broadly be protected by the First Amendment? Where do we think that the societal benefit of preventing a particular usage that hurts someone should be able to override the interest we have in just being able to write about or create images of someone?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're talking about non synthetic stuff, then there are all kinds of documentaries and news reports and really things that people have a public interest in making where you don't want to give someone the right to say you cannot depict me in a thing.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea that someone should be in absolute control of a photograph of themselves has only gained prominence over time. Emily Radikowski wrote that great essay for the cut several years ago, where she said a street photographer took a photo of me and I put it on my Instagram and I'm suing him to say that I can take his photo because it's a photo of me. And that is a very complicated argument in that case. But the idea that you should be in total control of any photo of you, I think a lot of people just instinctively believe that. And I think likeness law is what makes that have legal force. But you're saying, oh, there's some stuff here you wouldn't want to pull under that umbrella.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There have been some attempts to make a federal version of that, but likeness laws are really tricky because there's so much broader that they end up catching things like parity and satire and commentary. And they're just, I think, a much riskier than trying to create really targeted specific use laws.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's California, New York is another. There's Texas. At the federal level, there have been attempts to work this into, it's not a criminal statute, but there is a federal civil right to sue if you have non-synthetic non-consensual point of view and there have been attempts to work AI into that and say, all right, well, it's not a crime, but it's a thing that you can sue for under, I believe it is the reauthorization of the violence against women act. And then there have been attempts to, like you mentioned, just tie all of this into a big federal likeness law. So likeness laws are a mostly state level thing that says, all right, you can't Take Taylor Swift and make her look like she's advertised your instant pot.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The copyright issue is actually something that came up with non-synthetic non-consensual pornography because, say, if one of your partners took a nude picture of you, you don't own that picture. And that was already just a huge loophole that legislators have spent about a decade trying to make laws that meaningfully address non-consensual pornography that's not AI generated. And the frameworks they've come up with are getting ported over to AI generated imagery that a lot of it is about, all right, this is harassment, this is obscenity, this is some other kind of speech restriction that is allowable. A lot of non-consensual pornography is a kind of sexual harassment that we can find ways to wall outside protected speech and that we can target it in a way where it's not going to necessarily take down huge amounts of other speech the way that say just banning all AI generated”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's start with non consensual deepfake pornography, which I think everybody agrees is a bad thing that we should find ways to regulate away. A solution to revenge porn broadly on the internet is copyright law, right? You have made these files with your phone or your computer. Someone else distributes them. You say, no, those are mine. Copyright law will let me take this down. When you have deepfakes, there is no original. It's not a copy of something that you've made or that you own. You have to come up with some other way to do it, right? You have to come up with some other mechanism, whether that's just a law that says this is not right or it's some other idea like the right to your likeness. Where have most of the existing laws landed there?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“is mostly a small patchwork of past laws, a huge number of laws of varying likely constitutionality that people are debating, and not a whole lot at the federal level. There are a lot of different problems that AI-generated images pose, and there are cases where individual states have passed rules for individual problems. There are a few states that incorporate, say, non-consensual AI pornography laws into anti general revenge, non-consensual porn rules. There are a few states with rules about how you have to disclose manipulated images for elections. And there are some attempts in Congress to create a larger framework or in the, say, FEC and other government regulatory agencies to create a larger framework, but we just are still in this large chaotic period of people debating things.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've talked a lot about what the platforms can do. That's a private framework. The government has some role to play here, right? The big challenges are the First Amendment exists in the United States, and that really directly restricts the government from making speech regulations. And then we are a patchwork of state and federal laws. What is the current state of deep fake law? Are you allowed to do it? Are you not allowed to do it? How's that work?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problems a huge amount and make us confront them in a way that it was maybe easier to ignore before, especially by adding a technology that People who are creating that technology are trying to hype up in a way that sounds terrifying and world ending for other reasons. The problem with a lot of this is that you can't apply the kinds of paradigms that social media has because it really only takes one person with one capability to do a thing. It takes one bad actor to make something that you can spread in huge variations that are hard to recognize across huge numbers of platforms. I think that raises slightly different problems than say there's this big account on social media that's spreading something. Well, all right, Facebook can ban them.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, a screenshot tool, as far as I can tell, can remove the water parks. And I think there are ways that you can end up just stripping these things out. It's very, very hard to create a perfect watermarking system. Just so much of this relies on a lot of Adobe's argument being, well, eventually we want people to expect this, that it's going to be like, you know, if you look in your browser and you get a certificate warning that says there's no certificate for this webpage, maybe you won't trust the web page. I think the goal they're going for is the idea that everyone will be trained into expecting a certain level of authenticity, and I just don't think we're at that point. In some ways, these problems already existed. Photoshopped nudes have been a thing that has been used to harass people for a very long time, and Photoshopped images of politicians and manipulated content about politicians is nothing new. A thing AI definitely does is scale up those.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of the issue with C2PA right now is that you have to actually go in and pop it into a tool to check the metadata, which is just an extra step that the vast majority of people are not going to take. And that, yes, it's not applying to things like SORA yet, at least as far as open AI has told us. There is not a really prominent in your face this thing as AI in most cases.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, unless the labels are in their face, right? Unless you are scrolling on TikTok and you see something. And TikTok puts a big label right over the top of it that says, This is AI Which doesn't seem to happen anywhere. OpenAI did Sora its video generator. The videos are compelling, although they have some extremely terrifying errors in them. Not like a big label on them that says this is AI generated, like they're gonna travel without the context. OpenAI having produced them to promote their AI tool. Even that seems dangerous to me”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watermarks are rolling out places OpenAI adopted them in mid-February. They're starting to appear on Dolly images. You can look at them in Photoshop. I think the problem is more that this thing rolled out, but really most people are not going to care enough to check.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That shipped yet? I feel like we've been talking about C2PA and the content authenticity initiative. We've had Dana Rau, Adobe General Counsel on the show. He said the deepfake of the Pope wearing a puffer jacket was a catalyzing event for content provenance, which is an amazing quote, and I'll credit to Dana for it. But there's people wanting to do it. The activity we see, and then there's That shipped anywhere? Can you go look at it”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are companies that are signing on to an initiative called C2PA, which is, we were talking about watermarks earlier. It's a content provenance system. It includes a watermark that has metadata. And the goal there is the idea that you will be able to at least tell where something has come from and whether it's manipulated and that it's supposed to be this broad industry-wide everybody has the same watermark system, so it's very easy to look at an image and pop it in and check and see if it has the watermark. That's one of the leading ways the AI industry at this point is trying to deal with truth and provenance.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As long as small auditions are getting paid from what I gather, particularly Donald Trump, as long as he's getting paid. He might be cool with it. Outside of YouTube, which does have this big dependency on the labels and licensing And so I think this leading the way on having any particular policy with specificity, do any of the other platforms have ideas here that are more than we have an existing policy and we'll see how it works with the problem.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like the incentives for something like the music industry and for things that are basically aesthetic deepfakes, I think the incentives there are very different than they are for political manipulated imagery. That a lot of the question with YouTube is, okay, you are basically parodying someone in a way that may or may not legally be considered parody. We can make a deal where that person really, all they want is to get paid. And maybe they want something sufficiently controversial taken down. But if you give them some money, they'll be happy. That's just not really the issue at hand with political generated images. The problem there is around reputation. It's around people who do, at least in theory, care about did this person say this thing? Is this true? So I just don't know that you could cut a deal with Joe Biden that says every time Joe Biden you make something up about him.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one platform that stands out to me, and you and I have talked about this a lot, is YouTube, which has an enormous dependency on the music industry. The music industry is not happy about AI-generated covers using the voices of its artists, notably fake Drake caused a huge kerfuffle, universal music group went to Google. They announced some rules. They're going to prevent deepfakes or allow some licensing or the money to flow back to the artists. That is a very private sort of licensing scheme that sits outside of the law. It sits outside of the other platforms. Do you think YouTube is going to lead the way here because it has that pressure? Or is that just a one-off to the music industry?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So far, it feels like the consensus is we're going to label this, and that's going to be mainly our job, is that we're going to try to make sure we catch it. There are cases where, say, maybe you get it taken down if you haven't disclosed if you're a company or you're buying a political ad. But broadly, the idea seems to be we want to give people information and tell them that this is manipulated, and then they can make their own call.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the distribution side, which is, I think, where the real problem lies. If you make a bunch of defakes at your house with Donald Trump and you never share them with anyone, what harm have you caused? You start telling lies about both presidential candidates and you share them widely on social platforms that go viral. Now you have caused a giant external problem. And so it feels like the pressure to regulate this stuff is going to come to the platforms. And again, I think the desire of the platforms to moderate waxes and wanes and it feels low right now. Maybe it'll ramp back up. Where are the platforms right now with the deep face? Distribution problem”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back. So we've talked about what the companies that make software and hardware can do about the creation of deepfakes. And it seems like the best answer we have right now is But the real problems are in distribution.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does seem like the thing about a lot of generative AI tools is that there are just vast, vast numbers of ways to get them to do something. People are going to find those. Software bugs are a thing that has been a problem. Zero day exploits have been a problem on computers for a very long time. And this feels like it kind of falls into that category.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The part where you restrict the prompts OpenAI restricts the prompts, getty restricts the prompts, it's pretty easy to get around that, right? The Taylor Swift deepfakes that were floating around on Twitter, they were made in a Microsoft tool and Microsoft just had to get rid of the prompts. Is that just a forever cat and mouse game on the restrict the prompts idea?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most promising argument I've heard for these is the idea that you can, and this is an argument that Adobe has made to me, train people to expect a watermark. And so if what you're saying is we want to make it impossible to make these images without a watermark, I think that raises the same problems that we just talked about, which if anyone can make a tweaked version of an open source tool, they can just say don't put a watermark in. But I think that you could potentially get into a situation where you require a watermark, and if something doesn't have a watermark, there are ways that its design or its spread or people trusting it are severely hobbled. That's maybe the best argument for it I've heard.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's also like, well, that's about as far as you should let that go, right? Like, there's a point where you want to make a parody image of a Biden or a Trump, and you don't want Photoshop saying, hey, are you manipulating a real person's face? Like you're saying, that seems way too far. So a total ban seems implausible. There are other things you could do at the creation step. OpenAI bans certain prompts that are violates their terms of service. Getty won't let you talk about celebrities at all if you type a celebrity's name or basically any proper noun into the Getty image generator. It just tells you to go away. There's a lot of conversation about watermarking this stuff and making sure that real images have a watermark that say they're real images and AI images have a watermark that say they're AI images. Do any of those seem promising?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start with the second one, which I think has the more obvious answer saying no deepfakes are allowed whatsoever seems like it comes with a host of unintended consequences about speech and also seems like impossible to actually accomplish because of the existence of open source tools. Like I think, how would you actually enforce a total ban on deepfakes? And the answer is that Intel and Apple and Qualcomm and Nvidia and AMD and every other chipmaker have to prevent it somehow at the hardware level, which seems impossible. The only example I can think of where we have allowed that to happen is that Adobe Photoshop won't allow you to scan and print a dollar bill. Which makes sense, like it broadly makes sense that Adobe made that deal with the government.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stopping mean that you're just trying to limit the spread to where this doesn't become a huge viral thing that a bunch of people see, but it's still maybe technically possible to create this? Or do you want to say, all right, we have a zero tolerance policy if anything is created with any tool anywhere, even if someone keeps it to themselves, that is unconscionable?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you got a handful of companies with varying sets of restrictions, a broad general industry consensus. We shouldn't do deep fakes. And then you have reality, which is that there are deepfakes with celebrities all the time. There are deepfakes of teenage girls in high schools that are getting circulated on private message wards. It is happening. What can be done to stop it?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know necessarily how good the enforcement of it is going to be, but the companies seem so far pretty open to the idea of self-regulation, in part because I think this isn't just a civic-minded political thing dealing with unflattering stuff about real people is just a minefield they don't want. That said, there are also open source tools, stability AI is pretty close to open source. It's pretty easy to go in and make a thing that builds on it that maybe strips away the safeguards you get in its public version. It's just not quite equivalent to the way that, say, social platforms are able to completely control what's on their platforms.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One challenge here in America is the existence of the First Amendment. The Biden administration really did an executive order saying, don't do bad stuff. And these companies all agreed, okay, we won't do bad stuff. But the United States government is pretty restricted in saying you can't make deepfakes of other people because the First Amendment exists and it can't control that speech directly. Are the companies rising to that challenge and saying, we will self regulate because the government can't directly regulate us?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies are in slightly different spots, but they actually have come together very recently. They've signed an accord that says, look, we're going to take this seriously. They've announced policies that are varying levels of strictness, but tend toward if you're a major AI company, you're going to try to prevent people from creating information that maybe looks bad for public figures. Maybe you ban producing images of recognizable figures altogether, or you try to. And you have something in your terms of service that says if you're using this for political causes or if you're creating deceptive content, then we can kick you off.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about the actual technical challenges and the players behind them. OpenAI, that's a new company. There are a lot of other new companies in various stages of controversy. So mid-journey exists. That is an image generator stability AI exists and other image generator. They're getting sued by Getty for using the Getty library allegedly to train images that look like Getty photos. In this context, very important. MidJourney is getting sued as well. OpenAI is getting sued for training on the New York Times database. Just a few days ago, OpenAI announced Sora. It's text-to-video generator, which frankly makes terrifying videos. All those videos look terrifying. But you can see how an enterprising scammer could immediately use that to make something that looks like compelling video, something that didn't happen. All of these companies talk about AI alignment, making sure AI doesn't go off the rails. Where's the AI industry broadly on?”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let's go through the new players and how they might turbocharge the disinformation conversation now. And then let's talk about what might be done about it. I do just want to emphasize for the audience, it doesn't seem like the desire to regulate information on social networks is nearly as high as it has been in the past. And I think that is an important thing to start with. Because the technical challenges are so hard that wanting to”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and part of this is also political that there was a huge, largely, again, in the US, right-wing backlash to this, that this was the kind of thing that would get a state attorney general mad at you and get a congressional committee to investigate you as it ended up doing with pre-Musk Twitter. I think that, yeah, there became a real political price for doing this as well. Since then, some platforms have let Donald Trump back on. They've said, all right, but we cannot possibly moderate every single lie on this. We're going to just wash our hands of whether you're saying the election was stolen or not.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to bring that up specifically because that was the pinnacle, I think, of the big thinks about content moderation. Since that time, the companies have all done lots of layoffs. We've seen trust and safety diminished across the board. I think most famously with Twitter, now X, Elon Musk basically decimated the trust and safety team on that platform. It appears Lindy Acarina is trying to bring some of them back. But the idea that content moderation is the thing these platforms have to do is no longer in vogue, I think, the way it was when the Oversight Board was created.”
2024-02-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT