Speaker 1: Five years ago, this was a vast checkerboard at Potato
Speaker 1: Farms on New York's Long Island.
Speaker 2: Today this is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing
Speaker 2: developments ever conceived.
Speaker 1: Levettown, New York, America's first suburb, row after row after
Speaker 1: row of cookie cutter homes, the picture of the American dream.
Speaker 1: But recently, underneath the facade of perfect order, a group
Speaker 1: of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
Speaker 2: Someone was posting photos of many of the girls that
Speaker 2: we had gone to school with. There was one picture
Speaker 2: of me in a bathing suit, and I didn't have
Speaker 2: a bathing suit on anymore. It was just me naked,
Speaker 2: well not me, but me with someone else's body parts
Speaker 2: that looked exactly like my own.
Speaker 3: Over the last few years, rapid breakthroughs and machine learning
Speaker 3: have made it a lot easier and cheaper to make
Speaker 3: real looking photos or videos, pretty much anything you can
Speaker 3: think of, But innovation comes at a price.
Speaker 1: I felt gross. I felt like I needed to take
Speaker 1: a shower.
Speaker 2: I felt like I wanted to cry, I wanted to
Speaker 2: throw up, I wanted to scream.
Speaker 1: This is a story about a technology that is moving
Speaker 1: faster than the law where everyone is a suspect, even
Speaker 1: your neighbors.
Speaker 2: It was always in the back of my head, like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's someone that I know, But how do you find
Speaker 2: out who that someone is when you know so many
Speaker 2: people from school, soccer, all these things.
Speaker 3: What we discovered in Levertown led us on a winding journey.
Speaker 2: I just always had in the back of my mind
Speaker 2: that any of them could be the one.
Speaker 3: Through the darkest corners of the Internet, they call it
Speaker 3: an arms race between law enforcement and technology, and it's
Speaker 3: just we're losing.
Speaker 2: We are absolutely losing.
Speaker 3: Where online vigilantes and enterprising detectives are joining forces. If
Speaker 3: you're given prey, you want to go and get it.
Speaker 1: In this story, the victims flip the script, band together
Speaker 1: and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies. I'm Margie
Speaker 1: Murphy and I'm Olivia Carvill.
Speaker 3: This is Levittown, a new podcast series from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg,
Speaker 3: and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levettown on Bloomberg's Big Takee podcast.
Speaker 3: Find it on the heeartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 3: you get your podcasts. M