Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Jennifer, I don't know if you saw this making the
Speaker 2: rounds on Twitter last week, but this video went viral.
Speaker 1: It racked up more than a million views.
Speaker 2: It purports to be from a company that calls itself
Speaker 2: quote the world's first AI powered news network. Now, I
Speaker 2: wasn't able to independently confirm that this video is indeed
Speaker 2: all AI, but it's still worth taking a listen to
Speaker 2: kind of see where we are in this day and age.
Speaker 1: Check this out.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Channel one, a new way of consuming, reporting,
Speaker 3: and thinking about the news powered by artificial intelligence, all
Speaker 3: presented by our team of AI generated reporters.
Speaker 4: Will show you how AI powers and empowers our newsroom
Speaker 4: to deliver journalism that's fast, trustworthy, and accurate. Let's start
Speaker 4: with our reporters. You can hear us and see our
Speaker 4: lips moving, but no one was recorded saying what we're
Speaker 4: all saying, powered by sophisticated systems behind the scenes.
Speaker 2: Okay, so again, I was not able to independently confirm
Speaker 2: that this is indeed all AI, because if you were
Speaker 2: watching that it looks like actual people, but there are
Speaker 2: some clips of people of the actual anchors, like very
Speaker 2: quickly speaking different languages.
Speaker 1: It's all pretty wild.
Speaker 2: So depending on your view, it could either be really
Speaker 2: exciting or if you react like me and then everybody
Speaker 2: I showed this video too in the newsroom, it's pretty
Speaker 2: scary stuff. Let's see what our next guest has to
Speaker 2: say about all this, because he's got more than twenty
Speaker 2: five years of experience on the front lines when it
Speaker 2: comes to cybersecurity, which in this day and age increasingly
Speaker 2: looks at threats posed by so called deep fakes, AI
Speaker 2: and misinformation. We've got Chester Wiznski, Global Field CTO at Sophos.
Speaker 2: He joins us on Zoom from Vancouver.
Speaker 1: Chester. Good to have you with us this afternoon. How
Speaker 1: are you. I'm well, good to be here.
Speaker 5: It's getting close to the holiday times, so it's kind
Speaker 5: of an exciting time to get a chance to have
Speaker 5: a chat about all the things we're going to be
Speaker 5: seeing in our social media feeds the next few weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The reason I brought that up is because this is
Speaker 2: something that I signed my social media feed over the
Speaker 2: last couple of weeks, and again I reached out to
Speaker 2: this company, and I wasn't able to confirm whether or
Speaker 2: not it was all AI, but you got to see
Speaker 2: some of it, You got to listen to some of it.
Speaker 2: Is that the type of deep fake that we're seeing
Speaker 2: these days, Well.
Speaker 5: I think that's on the sophisticated end of the spectrum.
Speaker 5: And it's important to remember that wasn't probably created in
Speaker 5: real time. You know, it wasn't something that they could
Speaker 5: just whip up in thirty seconds, right, I mean there was.
Speaker 1: Clearly some effort very high that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: But I mean, on the other hand, like this is
Speaker 5: how far this has come, right, if you have the
Speaker 5: resources to want to create a realistic audio and video,
Speaker 5: and certainly, as we've all seen with chat GPT in
Speaker 5: the last year text, if you've got the resources, it
Speaker 5: is getting really close to the point where it's indiscernible
Speaker 5: from real content. I suspect that that entire video is
Speaker 5: all done an AI. While you were playing the role
Speaker 5: in there, I was hearing some telltale things in the
Speaker 5: audio that my ear kind of knows to listen for.
Speaker 5: But it's pretty convincing, isn't it.
Speaker 6: What were some of the telltale things to listen for
Speaker 6: because I must confess they passed me by completely.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, it's getting better all the time, certainly when
Speaker 5: we're looking at AI generated photos and even video. Sometimes
Speaker 5: AI historically has had a pretty bad approach to creating
Speaker 5: straight lines. You'd think straight lines are the simplest thing
Speaker 5: for a computer to draw, ever, but the way AI
Speaker 5: is trained, it's actually really hard to teach it to
Speaker 5: make straight lines. And with human faces, it often makes
Speaker 5: mistakes like one ear lobe being attached and the other
Speaker 5: one being detached, or too many teeth in the mouth,
Speaker 5: or you know, there's some telltale things that frequently messes
Speaker 5: up too many fingers on a hand, for example. But
Speaker 5: these are all getting better all the time. And in
Speaker 5: the audio the things I was listening for, there was
Speaker 5: there was there's a crispness to each word in the
Speaker 5: way that they're separated, and it almost had a bit
Speaker 5: of a slightly robotic tone when it's trying to inflect emotion.
Speaker 5: That is just feels a little bit off.
Speaker 1: When I'm listening to it. Right when I heard the.
Speaker 5: Anchor saying regular words, it sounded pretty plausible. But then
Speaker 5: if I listened really carefully when she was trying to
Speaker 5: inflect some emotion. It had a bit of a robotic
Speaker 5: on natural feel to.
Speaker 1: It, still so ched.
Speaker 2: It all raises the question how this stuff can be
Speaker 2: used for malicious purposes moving forward. I mean my first
Speaker 2: thought is misinformation and disinformation, the idea that videos can
Speaker 2: be created that you can just not trust, whether that's
Speaker 2: of a world leader saying something or doing something, or
Speaker 2: of a celebrity saying something that just isn't real.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think that's really the real problem here
Speaker 5: is this allows this content to be created at a
Speaker 5: scale that it hasn't been able to be done before. Right,
Speaker 5: if you and I have been speaking last year at Christmas,
Speaker 5: or even the year before at Christmas, it would have
Speaker 5: been pretty unlikely that a commercial company would have been
Speaker 5: able to produce that video that you played a little
Speaker 5: clip of. And it's accelerating so fast now and it's
Speaker 5: getting so hard to tell the good from the bad.
Speaker 5: It also means it can be done at a volume
Speaker 5: that humans would be unable of creating. Right When we
Speaker 5: think about a video like that, that's something that now
Speaker 5: can be done in hours and with's a modest amount
Speaker 5: of money, whereas before, you know, it would have required
Speaker 5: a ridiculous amount of resources to even attempt to generate
Speaker 5: something that believable. So while it's not something you and
Speaker 5: I are going to be able to create that newsroom
Speaker 5: clip tomorrow, maybe if we talk again a year from now,
Speaker 5: we might be able.
Speaker 1: To even be able to do that as individuals.
Speaker 5: So this is going to be very challenging moving forward
Speaker 5: because it's not something that's easily to disprove. So I
Speaker 5: think we need to be working with our media sources
Speaker 5: toward making sure the real content can be proven to
Speaker 5: be real as a way of, you know, allowing us
Speaker 5: to more easily discern what's real what isn't you know what?
Speaker 6: This is actually leading up to my next question because,
Speaker 6: as you say, a year from now, who knows what
Speaker 6: the capabilities are going to be, but from what you're saying,
Speaker 6: they're going to be much better. And then if we're
Speaker 6: looking at next Christmas when we have this conversation, the
Speaker 6: thing that will have just happened before next Christmas is
Speaker 6: the US election, and it's already very contentious, and we've
Speaker 6: got to ask what can the average voter, you know,
Speaker 6: US journalist, you know, policymakers, how are we supposed to
Speaker 6: be able to tell what's real and what's fake as
Speaker 6: the election approaches, and what are the risks to a
Speaker 6: free and fair election if we're not able to really
Speaker 6: get on top of this problem straight away.
Speaker 5: Well, I think we just need to get in a
Speaker 5: better habit of going to trusted, verifiable sources, whether that
Speaker 5: if it's about a candidate or an election campaign, then
Speaker 5: making sure that we're getting the information from the campaign itself,
Speaker 5: so that we know it's real from that candidate. And
Speaker 5: you know, we've been seeing on television ads for years
Speaker 5: that this ad was approved by whoever the candidate is, right,
Speaker 5: there is an official channel for receiving that information so
Speaker 5: that we can verify that it's definitely from a campaign
Speaker 5: or a party or that kind of thing. And of
Speaker 5: course our new sources, I mean Bloomberg is a great
Speaker 5: example of that. But I mean, no matter what your
Speaker 5: politics are, that there's a lot of trusted journalism out there,
Speaker 5: and going to those sources to verify a story before
Speaker 5: we repost things on social media I think is going
Speaker 5: to be a really important step because trusting random accounts
Speaker 5: on x and Meta and TikTok is probably going to
Speaker 5: lead us in a dangerous direction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is certainly true, and I'm not optimistic about
Speaker 2: the way that these platforms have allowed misinformation to flourish.
Speaker 2: Hey chat, I promised i'd ask you, as somebody who's
Speaker 2: been on the front lines of cybersecurity for twenty five years,
Speaker 2: what worries you, what keeps you up at night?
Speaker 5: Well, the quality of this stuff and the quantity of
Speaker 5: that can be created is going to really blur the
Speaker 5: lines for a lot of people between you know, the
Speaker 5: reality and this misinformation, and a lot of us have
Speaker 5: gotten too comfortable. You know, we don't specifically study people
Speaker 5: trying to manipulate elections. We're worried about people being manipulated
Speaker 5: into scams, getting you know, their money stolen from them,
Speaker 5: getting their computers infected with viruses, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Right, And when we.
Speaker 5: Look at the things that people used to pay attention to,
Speaker 5: you know, they read their email and they look for
Speaker 5: the spelling mistakes. So this email doesn't really look like
Speaker 5: it's from Bank of America. All those tell tale signs
Speaker 5: are out the window now, right, There's really no discernible
Speaker 5: difference between computer generated content that a criminal can make
Speaker 5: tens of thousands of inn minutes and the real thing
Speaker 5: that you're really getting from your financial institution or anybody
Speaker 5: else that you do commerce with. So I think us
Speaker 5: educating society on to be more suspicious and to double
Speaker 5: check things before they believe them is going to be
Speaker 5: important part of it. And more than that, I think
Speaker 5: a lot of it comes back on the industry itself,
Speaker 5: on the AI industry, and on us people in security
Speaker 5: to build better tools to sort through this stuff so
Speaker 5: that the majority of what ends up in your inbox
Speaker 5: is signal, not.
Speaker 6: Noise, just real quick thirty seconds. What do you think
Speaker 6: regulators and social media companies should be doing about this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's challenging.
Speaker 5: I mean, the Biden White House has published in an
Speaker 5: executive order at the end of October that covers a
Speaker 5: lot of AI usage and is moving toward marking AI
Speaker 5: generated content with a watermark. Certainly when it's produced by
Speaker 5: the federal government. That's encouraging. But of course, what I'm
Speaker 5: really worried about is people who aren't going.
Speaker 4: To follow the law.
Speaker 5: Right if we're worried about Russians and influencing our next election,
Speaker 5: they're not going to abide by an executive order from
Speaker 5: the White House to be good boys and good girls.
Speaker 5: That's just not going to fly right. We have to
Speaker 5: be able to, I think, invest our effort in proving
Speaker 5: authenticity rather than trying to prove an inauthentic content.
Speaker 2: Chester really appreciate you taking the time. That's Chet Wiznsky,
Speaker 2: Global Field CTO at Sophos joining us from Vancouver.