#220 - The Information Apocalypse
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Summary
Nina Schick is an author and broadcaster who specializes in how technology and artificial intelligence are reshaping society. She has advised global leaders in many countries, including Joe Biden, and is a regular contributor to Bloomberg, Sky, CNN and the BBC. She speaks seven languages and holds degrees from Cambridge University and University College London. Her new book, Deep Fakes, explores the terrain we re about to discuss: the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation in our society now, and the coming problem of deep fakes, which is, when you imagine it in detail, fairly alarming. In this episode, Nina talks about her background and how it intersects with her interests in history and politics, and how she became interested in the emerging field of information warfare. She also discusses how she got her start as a writer and journalist, and why she thinks it s important to have a formal relationship with technology and AI in order to make sense of the world we live in. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/Making Sense. To learn more about our sponsorships and support our efforts to make the podcast a great place to live up to our best selves, visit makingsense.org/sponsorship . Thanks for listening and supporting the podcast! Sam Harris and her team at The Making Sense Podcast Thank you for listening to the podcast? -Sam Harris and his team at Samharris.org This podcast is all about making sense and understanding the world through words and data and connecting it with people through stories and connecting them through them through the internet and social media and connections through the digital world through the world and the power of human connections and experiences and experiences through the connections and connections and culture and connections, and all of the things that matter more of that becomes a good day in the making sense, and more of it becomes a real thing, and a better of that in the good things, everywhere and a good thing, a better than that, a place and a place, a good place, and so much more, a real place, more of a thing, thank you, thanks to you, really and a lot of things, really really, really less of that, really than that etc., thanks, really, truly, really more of things like that, good things really, etc. - Thank you, Sarah Ravelled
Transcript
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Nina is an author and broadcaster who specializes in how technology and artificial intelligence
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She has advised global leaders in many countries, including Joe Biden, and she's a regular contributor
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Nina speaks seven languages and holds degrees from Cambridge University and University College,
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London, and her new book is Deep Fakes, which explores the terrain we're about to discuss.
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We talk about the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation in our society now and the
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coming problem of deep fakes, which is, when you imagine it in detail, fairly alarming.
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We get into the history of Russian active measures against the West, the weaponization of the migrant
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crisis in Europe, Russian targeting of the African American community, Trump and the rise of political
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cynicism, QAnon, the prospect of violence surrounding the presidential election, and other topics.
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Anyway, this is all scary stuff, but Nina is a great guide through this wilderness.
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Yeah, you have a very interesting background, which I think suggests many common interests
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I don't think we're going to be able to get into that because you have produced so many
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urgent matters in your recent book that we need to talk about.
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But to get started here, what is your background and personally, but also just what you're focusing
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on these days that gives you an expertise on the topics we're going to talk about?
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Well, it's a really interesting and crazy story, one that could only happen in the 21st century.
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My father was a German criminal defense lawyer who in the 70s decided, you know, he was going
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to seek spirituality and travel east and took his car, threw in a few books and did that
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big journey that a lot of young people did back in the 70s through Afghanistan, India, and
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then ended up in Nepal, which at this time was still this hermetic kingdom, fell in love
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with it and met my mother there briefly after a decade or so.
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And basically, my mother came from this totally different universe.
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She grew up in Nepal as a member of this community in a Himalayan tribe, had no running
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water, electricity, shoes when she was growing up.
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And because she met my father, you know, they fell in love and they kind of decided to have
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And I grew up in Kathmandu in the 80s and the 90s.
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And then eventually I came to the UK to go to university and I went to Cambridge and UCL.
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And my kind of discipline is really in history and politics.
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I've always been fascinated by history and politics.
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And especially at this time when the geopolitical sands seem to be shifting in such a dramatic
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So my career over the last 10 years has really been working at the heart of Westminster as
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a policy analyst, a journalist, and an advisor on some of the key geopolitical shifts around
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So this includes the kind of what happened with Russia and the invasion of Ukraine in 2013.
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Then, obviously, I was very tied into the work here in the UK around Brexit.
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I was helping to advise the government on that in 2016.
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Then, of course, the election of Trump in 2016.
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Then I went on to advise Emmanuel Macron's campaign, which was also interestingly hacked
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And finally, I got to a point in 2018 where I was working with the former NATO Secretary General
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and he covened a group of global leaders, which included Joe Biden.
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And he wanted to look at how the 2020 election might be impacted by what we had seen in 2016
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And that is really the starting point for my book.
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So I have this background in geopolitics, politics, information warfare.
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And my area of interest is really how the exponential changes in technology,
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and particularly in AI, are rewriting not only politics, but society at large as well.
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So, Nepali, German, Tamang, because my mother is from an ethnic minority group in Nepal,
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So, Nepali, German, Tamang, and Hindi, because everybody in Nepal speaks Hindi.
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So, that was, you know, something I wish I could give my daughter as well.
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Well, I live in the UK now, and most people in the UK, you know, we speak English.
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So, your English betrays none of that colorful backstory.
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So, yeah, I know we have common interests in the kinds of things that brought your father
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to Nepal in the first place and meditation and forming a philosophy of life that is aimed
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at deeper levels of well-being than is often attained by people.
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But we have such a colossal mess to clean up in our society now with how our information
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ecosystem has been polluted and deranged that I think we're just going to do another
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podcast on the happy talk of what we could share when we get past these increasingly terrifying
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I mean, it's really, it's amazing to see how much of this is our own doing, and we'll
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talk about bad actors and people who are consciously using our technology against us to really destroy
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the possibility of living in an open society, but so much of this is a matter of our entertaining
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ourselves into a kind of collective madness and what seems like it could be a coming social
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I realize that if you're not in touch with these trends, you know, if anyone in the audience
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who isn't, this kind of language coming from me or anyone else can sound hyperbolic, but
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we're really going over some kind of precipice here with respect to our ability to understand
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what's going on in the world and to converge on a common picture of a shared reality, because
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we're in the midst of an information war, and it's being waged against democratic societies
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by adversaries like Russia and China, but it's also a civil war that's being waged by
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factions within our society, and there are various political cults, and then there's the president
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All of this is happening on the back of and facilitating an utter collapse of trust in
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institutions and a global decline in democracy, and again, we've built the very tools of our
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derangement ourselves, and in particular, I'm talking about social media here.
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Yeah, so your book goes into this, and it's organized around this new piece of technology
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that we call deep fakes, and the book is deep fakes, the coming infocalypse, which, that's
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When you say it, it's hard to understand what's being said there, but it's really, you're talking
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Just remind people what deep fakes are, and suggest what's at stake here in terms of how
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difficult it could be to make sense of our world in the presence of this technology.
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So a deep fake is a type of synthetic media, and what synthetic media essentially is, is
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It can be an image, it can be a video, it can be a text that is generated by AI.
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And this ability of AI to generate fake or synthetic media is really, really nascent.
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We're only at the very, very beginning of the synthetic media revolution.
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It was only probably in about the last four or five years that this has been possible,
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and for the last two years that we've been seeing how the real world applications of this
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have been leeching out from beyond the AI research community.
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So the first thing to say about synthetic media is that it is completely going to transform
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Because in future, all media is going to be synthetic, because it means that anybody can
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create content to a degree of fidelity that is only possible for Hollywood studios right
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And they can do this for little to no cost using apps or software, various interfaces,
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And the reason why this is so interesting, another reason why synthetic media is so interesting
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is until now, the best kind of computer effects, CGI, you still can't quite get humans right.
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So when you use CGI to do effects where you're trying to create robotic humans, it still
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doesn't look like it's called, you know, Uncanny Valley.
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But it turns out that AI, when you train your machine learning systems with enough data,
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they're really, really good at generating fake humans or synthetic humans, both in images.
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I mean, and when it comes to generating fake human faces, so images, still images, it's already
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And if you want to kind of test that, you can go and look at thispersondoesnotexist.com.
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Every time you refresh the page, you'll see a new human face that, to the human eye, to
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you or me, Sam, will look at that and will think that's an authentic human, whereas that
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is just something that's generated by AI, that human literally doesn't exist.
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And also now increasingly in other types of media like audio and film.
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So I could take essentially a clip of a recording with you, Sam, and I could use that to train
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I can take your voice, synthesize it, get my AI kind of machine learning system to recreate
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Obviously, this is going to have tremendous commercial applications.
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For example, corporate communications, advertising, the future of all movies, video games.
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But this is also the most potent form of myths and disinformation, which you're democratizing
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for almost anyone in the world at a time when our information ecosystem has already become
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So the first thing I'd say about synthetic media is it is actually just heralding this
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tremendous revolution in the way that we communicate.
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The second thing I'd say is that it's coming at a time when we've had lots of changes in our
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So, you know, that society hasn't been able to keep up with from the internet to social media
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And then the final thing, this is where I come to deep fakes, is that this field is still
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so nascent and emerging that the taxonomy around it is completely undecided yet.
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And as I already kind of pointed out or touched upon, there will be legitimate use cases for
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And this is one of the reasons why this cat is out of the bag.
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There's no way we're putting it back in because there's so much investment in the kind of
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commercial use cases ever since, I think there's almost 200 companies now that are working
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So we have to distinguish between the legitimate use cases of synthetic media and how we draw
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So I very broad brush in my book say that the use and intent behind synthetic media really
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So I refer to deep fake as when a piece of synthetic media is used as a piece of mis or
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And, you know, there is so much more that you could delve into there with regards to the
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kind of the ethical implications and the taxonomy.
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And that's my definition between synthetic media and deep fakes.
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Well, so as you point out, all of this would be good, clean fun if it weren't for the fact
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that we know there are people intent upon spreading misinformation and disinformation and doing
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I mean, not just for amusement, although that can be harmful enough.
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It's something that state actors and people internal to various states are going to leverage
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to further divide society from itself and increase political polarization.
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But it's amazing that it is so promising in the fun department that we can't possibly even
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I mean, it's just that's the problem we're seeing on all fronts.
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So it is with the the ad revenue model that is selecting for so many of its harmful effects.
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I mean, we just can't break the spell wherein people want the cheapest, most fun media and
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And yet the the harms that are accruing are so large that it's it's amazing just to see
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that there's just no there's no handhold here whereby we can resist our slide toward the
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Just to underscore how quickly this technology is developing in your book, you point out what
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happened with the once Martin Scorsese released his film, The Irishman, which had this exceedingly
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expensive and laborious process of trying to de-age its principal actors, Robert De Niro and
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And that was met with something like derision for the the imperfection of what was achieved
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And then very, very quickly, someone on YouTube using free software did a nearly perfect de-aging
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And again, these tools are going to be free, right?
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And and ultimately, the best tools will be free.
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So you already have various kind of software platforms online.
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So the barriers to entry have come down tremendously right now.
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If you wanted to make a convincing deepfake a video, you would still need to have some knowledge,
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some knowledge of machine learning, but you wouldn't have to be an AI expert by any means.
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But already now we have apps that allow people to do certain things like swap their faces into
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For example, we face, I don't know if you've come across that app.
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But if you have a teenager, you've probably come across it, you can basically put your own face
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into a popular scene from a film like Titanic or something.
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But experts who I speak to on the generation side, because it's so hugely exciting to people
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who are generating synthetic media think that by the end of the decade, any YouTuber, any
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teenager will have the ability to create special effects in film that are better than anything
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And that's really why I put that anecdote about the Irishman into the book, because it
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just demonstrates the power of synthetic media.
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I mean, Scorsese was working on this project from 2015.
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He had this best special effects artist, post-production work, multi-million dollar budget, and still
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And now one YouTuber, Free Software, takes a clip from Scorsese's film in 2020.
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This year, he can already create something that's far more, when you look at it, looks
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As I already mentioned, with images, it can already do it perfectly.
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There is another YouTuber, for example, who, because a lot of the kind of early pieces
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There is a YouTuber called Vocal Synthesis, who uses an open-sourced AI model to train,
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So he can, something that he's done that's gotten many, many views on YouTube is he's literally
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taken audio clips of dead presidents and then made them rap N.W.A.'s Fuck the Police, right?
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He, very interesting, this is an indicator of how complex these challenges are going to
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Because another thing that he did was he took Jay-Z's voice and made him rap, recite Shakespeare's
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And interestingly, Jay-Z's record label filed a copyright infringement claim against him
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But this is really just a forebear of the kind of battles we're going to see when any anonymous
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user, this is, can take your likeness, can take your biometrics and make you say or do
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And of course, this is disastrous to any liberal democratic model, because in a world where
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anything can be faked, everyone becomes a target.
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But even more than that, if anything can be faked, including evidence that we today see
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as an extension of our own reality, and I say evidence in quotation marks, video, film,
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So the very basis of what is reality starts to become corroded.
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It's just that our perception of reality starts to become increasingly clouded.
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Again, we're going to get into all of the evidence of just how aggressively this will be
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used, given everything else that's been happening in our world.
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We'll talk about Russia and Trump and QAnon and other problems here.
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But many of us can dimly remember 20 years ago before COVID, when the Bush audio tape dropped
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and Trump sort of attempted to deny that the audio was real of him on the bus.
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But we were not yet in the presence of such widespread use of deepfake technology that anyone
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Now, apparently it didn't matter, given how corrupted our sense of everything had become
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But we could see the resort to claiming fakery that will be relied upon by everyone and anyone
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Because there'll be so much of it around that really it will only be charitable to extend
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the benefit of the doubt to people who say, listen, that wasn't me.
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That's just a perfect simulacrum of my voice and even my face.
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But you actually can't believe your eyes and ears at this point.
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In any of your conversations with experts on this topic, are any of them hopeful that
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we will be able to figure out how to put a watermark on digital media in such a way that
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we will understand its provenance and be able to get to ground truth when it matters?
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So I think the problem of what we do about it is so huge that ultimately we can only fight
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the corroding information ecosystem by building society-wide resilience.
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But the solutions, if you want to term it that way, broadly fit into two categories.
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So because synthetic media is going to become ubiquitous, and we as humans will not be able
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to discern because of the fidelity, the quality, whether it's real or fake.
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So you can't rely on digital forensics in the sense that somebody goes through and clicks
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and looks at each media and decides, oh, are the eyes blinking correctly?
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Because the generation side of synthetic media is still so nascent.
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Second, the sheer volume when you talk about at the scale at which you can generate synthetic
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media means that humans are never going to be able to go through it all, never going to
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So we have to rely on building the AI software to detect, for example, deep fakes.
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And right now, there is an interest, and increasingly, there are certain experts and groups who are
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putting money into being able to detect deep fakes.
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However, the problem is, because of the adversarial nature of the AI and the way that it's trained,
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every time you build a detector that's good enough to detect the fake, the generation model
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So you're in this never-ending game of cat and mouse, where, you know, you keep on having
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And also, given the various different models and ways in which the fakes can be generated,
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there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all model.
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There's a hypothetical question, which is open still in the AI research community, about whether
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But is there a point where the fakes become so sophisticated that even AI and AI detector
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can never detect in the DNA of that fake that it's actually a piece of synthetic media?
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But I will say that there is far more research going into the generation side, because like
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so much in terms of the information ecosystem, the architecture of the information ecosystem
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and the information age, it has been driven by this almost utopian flawed vision of how these
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technologies will be serving an unmitigated good for humanity without thinking about how they
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might amplify the worst sides of human intention as well.
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The second side, and you touched upon that, is building provenance architecture into the
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So basically embedding right into the hardware of devices, whether that's a camera, a mobile
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phone, the authenticity watermark to prove that that piece of media is authentic.
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You can track it throughout its life to show that it hasn't been tampered with or edited.
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And this is something that, for example, Adobe is working on, along with the, on its content
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So there are technical solutions underway, both inside, in terms of the detection and the
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However, ultimately, this is a human problem to the extent that disinformation or bad information
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didn't just come about at the turn of the millennium.
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It's just that we have never seen it at this scale.
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We have never seen it this potent, and we have never, ever been able to see, to have it as
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There's no way we can deal with the challenges of our corroding information ecosystem without
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How do we prepare society for this new reality?
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And the biggest problem is the information ecosystem has become corrupt to the extent that
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we can't even identify what the real risks are, right?
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We're too busy fighting each other about other things without seeing what the real existential
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I mean, that is a very symptom of the problem itself, the fact that we can't even agree on
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It makes me think that one solution to part of the problem, I don't think it captures all
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of it, but certainly some of the most pressing parts of it could be solved if we had lie detection
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Just imagine we had real-time lie detection, and you could go to the source, you know, if
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some awful piece of audio emerged from me, and it purported to be a, you know, part of
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my podcast, where I said something, you know, reputation-canceling, and I said, well, that's
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a fake, that wasn't me, the only way to resolve that would be to tell whether I'm lying or
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We're forcing ourselves into a position where it's going to be a kind of emergency not to
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be able to tell with real confidence whether or not somebody is lying.
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So I think we're going to, in addition to the arms race between deep fakes and deep fake
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identifying AI, I think this could inspire a lie detection arms race, because there's
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so many other reasons why we would want to be able to detect people who are lying.
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Having just watched the presidential and vice presidential debates in America, one could
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see that the utility of having a red light go off over someone's head when he or she knows
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But if we can't trust people, and we can't trust the evidence of our senses when we have
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media of them saying and doing things convincingly delivered to us in torrents, it's hard to see
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how we don't drift off into some horrifically dystopian dream world of our own confection.
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Absolutely, and this is really why, you know, I wrote the book.
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I wrote it in a way that was very accessible to anyone to pick up and zoom through an afternoon,
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because I think without this conceptual framework, where we can connect everything from Russian
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disinformation to the increasingly partisan political divide in the United States, but
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also around the rest of the Western world, and understanding how now with the age of coming,
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with the age of synthetic media upon us, how our entire perception of the world is going
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to be changed in a way that is completely unprecedented, how we can be manipulated in the age of information
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where we had assumed that once we have access to this much information, that, you know, surely
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But to actually understand how the information ecosystem itself has become corrupt, I think
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And to be honest with you, I do tend to think that things will probably get worse before they
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And I think the US election is a great case study of that, because it's almost no matter the
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Let's say that Trump loses, and he loses by large margin, you know, that he could still
00:29:49.460
refuse to go, even if the Secret Service will come and, you know, take his bags and ask him,
00:29:56.500
He has this influence now where a lot of his followers genuinely believe that he is, you know,
00:30:08.060
And if he asks them to take arms and take to the streets, I mean, this is literally already
00:30:13.680
You have armed insurrection, militia kind of patrolling the streets of the United States
00:30:17.920
on both the left and the right for their political grievances.
00:30:22.460
So if Biden wins, let's say Trump goes quietly and Biden wins, well, then you still haven't
00:30:27.820
addressed the bigger problem of the infocalypse, where the information ecosystem has become so corrupt
00:30:33.600
and so corroded and the synthetic media revolution is still upon us.
00:30:37.520
So I, okay, I'm hopeful that we still have time to address this, because like I said, this
00:30:43.000
technology is so nascent, we can still try to take some kind of action in terms of what's
00:30:50.680
How are we going to adjudicate the use of synthetic media?
00:30:54.220
How can we digitally educate the public about the risks of synthetic media?
00:30:58.900
But it is a ticking time bomb, and the window is short.
00:31:03.600
As if to underscore your last point, at the time we're speaking here, there's a headline
00:31:09.100
now circulating that 13 men were just arrested, including seven members of a right-wing militia
00:31:15.860
plotting to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, for the purposes
00:31:23.940
One can only imagine the kind of information diet of these militia members.
00:31:29.320
But this is the kind of thing that gets engineered by crazy information and pseudo-facts being
00:31:37.000
And this is the kind of thing that when even delivered by a mainstream news channel, one
00:31:43.900
now has to pause and wonder whether or not it's even true, because there's been such a breakdown
00:31:53.140
And there's so many cries of fake news, both cynical and increasingly real, that it's just
00:32:00.520
we're dealing with the circumstance of such informational pollution.
00:32:05.000
Let's talk about Russia's role in all of this, because Russia has a history of prosecuting what
00:32:13.880
And we really have, for a long time, been in the midst of an information war, which is
00:32:22.780
And Russia is increasingly expert at exploiting the divisions in our society, especially racial
00:32:30.160
So maybe you can summarize some of this history.
00:32:32.960
Yeah, I mean, I start my book with Russia because my career intersected a lot with what
00:32:42.100
Russia was doing in Ukraine in 2014 and the kind of information war they fought around
00:32:48.500
the annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where they basically denied that it was happening
00:32:56.900
This was the Malaysian aircraft that was shot down over eastern Ukraine, which now has been
00:33:02.880
proven to have been by Russian military services.
00:33:06.000
But at the time, they were saying this had nothing to do with them and that this was pro-Russian
00:33:10.880
Ukrainian separatists who had shot down the airliner.
00:33:15.000
So what Russia did with information warfare around Ukraine, Crimea, around Europe in 2015, when
00:33:22.340
Putin and Assad stepped up their bombardment of civilians in Syria, unleashing this mass
00:33:29.560
migration, which basically led to the EU's migrant crisis five years ago.
00:33:33.900
I don't know if you remember those images of people just arriving at the shores, you know,
00:33:42.740
But as we now know, you know, a lot of them were there were also terrorists, economic migrants.
00:33:47.940
And how that almost tore Europe apart and the information war that Russia fought around those
00:33:55.700
events where they perpetrated these stories about, for example, girls in Germany who had
00:34:03.100
been raped by, supposedly raped by arriving migrants.
00:34:12.220
So it's dividing the line, you know, it's blurring the line between what's real and fake.
00:34:16.220
But what was also very interesting for me was that I worked on or I studied and I worked
00:34:23.120
on the Russian information operations around the U.S. election in 2016.
00:34:27.460
And the first thing to say about that is, to me, it's an it's a we can see how corrupt
00:34:33.860
the information ecosystem has become to the extent that those information operations have
00:34:41.020
Some people say that Russia is behind everything and others deny that Russia did anything at
00:34:50.000
You know, for sure, the Russians intervened in the 2016 election and they continue to intervene
00:34:58.260
And I suppose what was very interesting to me about what Russia was doing was how this information
00:35:05.700
warfare strategy, which is old and it goes all the way back to the Cold War, was becoming
00:35:11.700
increasingly potent with the weapons of this modern information ecosystem.
00:35:19.840
What they did in Ukraine and then Europe around the migrant crisis and then around the U.S.
00:35:25.480
election was influence operations on social media where they actually posed in the case of
00:35:35.260
And then they over years, by the way, this wasn't just them getting involved in the weeks
00:35:41.940
They started their influence operations in the United States in 2013.
00:35:46.220
They built up these tribal communities on social media and built up, well, basically played
00:35:53.320
identity politics, built up their pride in their distinct identity.
00:35:58.700
And interestingly, this wasn't just Russians targeting, you know, right wing kind of Trump
00:36:10.260
And as a matter of fact, they disproportionately focused on the African-American community.
00:36:15.040
So they built these fake groups, pages, communities where you imbue them with your distinct
00:36:25.700
And then as we got closer to the election, those groups were then sporadically injected
00:36:30.760
with lots of political grievances, some of them legitimate, to make these groups feel
00:36:37.120
And again, the primary focus of their influence operations on social media was the African-American
00:36:43.160
community who they were basically targeting so that they felt so disenfranchised and disconnected
00:36:49.100
from Hillary, America at large, that they wouldn't go and vote in the election, right?
00:36:54.000
And what has happened now, four years later, is that those operations are still ongoing,
00:37:02.320
So in 2016, it might have been a troll farm in St. Petersburg.
00:37:06.720
But in 2020, one operation that was earlier this year, which was revealed through CNN, Twitter,
00:37:14.580
Facebook, or Facebook, a joint investigation, was that the Russian agency, which is in charge
00:37:20.640
of the social media operations, it's called the Internet Research Agency, IRA, they had basically
00:37:29.460
They had set up what looked ostensibly like a legitimate human rights organization.
00:37:34.900
They had hired employees in Ghana, real, authentic Ghanaians, and then told them, you know, you're
00:37:41.560
going to have to kind of post, build these groups and communities.
00:37:45.040
And here is basically the same memes, the same ideas that they had used in 2016.
00:37:54.640
So I start with Russia, because what is really interesting is that their strategy of information
00:38:02.840
warfare is actually something called, is a phenomenon where they flood the zone with a lot of information,
00:38:13.260
So they're not just targeting, you know, Trump voters, for example.
00:38:16.500
And this chaos, this bad information, this chaotic information has the effect where it's called
00:38:25.820
So this chaotic, bad information overload gets to the point where we can't make decisions in
00:38:33.100
our own interest of protecting ourselves, our country, our community.
00:38:36.940
And that very spirit of information warfare has come to characterize the entire information
00:38:45.240
I mean, I start with Russia, I map out how their tactics are far more potent, but you cannot
00:38:51.720
talk about the corrosion of the information ecosystem without recognizing that the same
00:38:56.900
chaotic spirit has come to imbue our homegrown debate as well.
00:39:03.460
So I actually think, you know, of course, the Russians are intervening in the US election in 2020.
00:39:08.660
What's also very interesting is that other rogue and authoritarian states around the world are looking
00:39:14.360
at what Russia is doing and copying them, China is becoming more like Russia.
00:39:21.840
And arguably, the domestic disinformation, misinformation and information disorder is far
00:39:28.800
more harmful than anything that foreign actors are doing.
00:39:31.140
Yeah, I want to cover some of that ground again, because it's easy not to understand at
00:39:38.620
first pass just how sinister and insidious this all is, because the fact that we can't agree
00:39:48.480
as a society that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election is one of the
00:39:56.060
greatest triumphs of the Russian interference in our information ecosystem, the fact that
00:40:02.660
that you have people on the left over ascribing to Russian influence causality, and you have people
00:40:10.180
on the right denying any interference in the first place, and the fact that each side can sleep soundly
00:40:17.620
at night convinced that the other side is totally wrong, that is itself a symptom of how polluted
00:40:26.780
It's a kind of singularity on the landscape, where everything is now falling into it.
00:40:32.220
And it's, it's happening based on the dynamics you just sketched out.
00:40:37.440
Whereas if you mingle lies of any size and consequence with enough truths and half truths, or, you know,
00:40:45.860
background facts that suggest a plausibility to these lies, or at least you can't, you can't ever
00:40:52.320
ascertain what's true, it leads to a kind of epistemological breakdown and a cynicism that is the goal of
00:41:00.760
this entire enterprise. It's not merely to misinform people, which is to say, have them believe things
00:41:06.300
that are false. It is to break people's commitment to being informed at all, because they realize how
00:41:13.180
hopeless it is. And so we all just tune out and go about our lives being manipulated to who knows
00:41:19.300
what end. So, you know, the, some of the history, which you go through in your book is, relates to
00:41:24.700
the fact that, you know, that for long ago, long before they had any tools, really to work with,
00:41:29.820
you know, certainly didn't have social media. The Russians planted the story that AIDS was a,
00:41:35.760
was essentially a bioweapon cooked up in a US lab, you know, with the purpose of performing a
00:41:41.760
genocide on the black community. And they targeted the black community with this lie. And to this
00:41:48.260
day, you know, a disproportionate number of people in the black community in the US believe that AIDS
00:41:54.500
was made in a lab for the purpose of, you know, wiping out black people. But the reason why that was
00:42:00.060
so clever is because it has an air of plausibility to it, given the history of the Tuskegee experiments,
00:42:08.520
the syphilis experiments, where African Americans who had syphilis were studied and not given the
00:42:16.620
cure, even once the cure, penicillin emerged. They were then, you know, studied to the end of their
00:42:22.820
lives with what amounted to the ethical equivalent of the Nazi cold water experiments, trying to see
00:42:30.220
the effects of tertiary syphilis on people. And it was an absolutely appalling history. And it's in
00:42:36.880
the context of that history that you can make up new allegations that should seem patently insane,
00:42:45.700
they're so evil, but they don't seem patently insane, given the points of contact to a surrounding
00:42:53.380
reality that that is fact based. And so it is with, you know, the current leveraging of identity
00:43:00.340
politics in the U.S. where they create Black Lives Matter Facebook groups that are fake, and they can,
00:43:08.000
you know, I think there's, there was one protest in Times Square that had like 5,000 or 10,000 people
00:43:15.060
show up, and it was completely fake. I mean, the organizers were fake, you know, they were Russians,
00:43:20.940
there was no man on the ground who was actually a real leader of this thing. And people went to this
00:43:25.880
protest, never realizing that they were characters in somebody's dreamscape.
00:43:32.540
Absolutely. This is why it is so dastardly. And as you pointed out, the Russians, or even the
00:43:40.200
Soviets going back to the Cold War, very quickly identified that race relations is a sore point
00:43:45.280
for the United States. And they abused that to great effect. And the Operation Infection,
00:43:52.500
the lie that you already correctly pointed out, that the CIA invented the HIV virus as a way to
00:44:00.460
kill African Americans was something that in the 1980s took about 10 years to go viral. But when it
00:44:08.060
did, oh boy, did it grab a hold of the imagination to the extent that it still plays a challenge when
00:44:14.540
you're trying to deal with HIV public health policy today, where you have communities,
00:44:19.660
African American communities, you disproportionately believe that the HIV virus is somehow connected to
00:44:25.820
a government plan to commit a genocide. And in 2016, I suppose, what happened is that the strategy was
00:44:36.040
the same, right? We want to play identity politics, we want to hit the United States where it hurts.
00:44:41.180
We know that race is the dividing factor. But in 2016, it became so much more powerful,
00:44:47.920
because Operation Infection, the HIV lie was a single lie. Whereas in 2016, and what's happening
00:44:54.440
in 2020 is numerous groups, communities, pages, where it's not only about spreading one lie,
00:45:00.840
but it's actually about entrenching tribal divisions, entrenching identity politics. And
00:45:07.680
in the context of what's happened in 2020, very interesting, some of the other kind of
00:45:13.200
information operations that have come out that have been exposed is unsurprisingly, given your
00:45:19.520
interest, Sam, and kind of the culture wars and wokeness, is that a lot of kind of unemployed
00:45:26.160
American journalists who had lost their job due to COVID, were now working for a kind of social
00:45:33.400
justice oriented left wing news, news network, in favor of BLM. And it turned out that actually,
00:45:40.920
that entire network was fabricated, and the Russians were behind it. So these unwitting
00:45:46.500
Americans who genuinely have good intentions are being co-opted into something that is actually
00:45:53.560
being run by Russian intelligence. And I suppose with our information ecosystem right now, it's so
00:46:00.700
much easier to actually infiltrate public life in the United States in a way that wouldn't have been
00:46:06.580
possible in the 1980s. So we can't, we don't even know what we're starting to see the impact of these
00:46:13.280
operations on society. That's not to say that, you know, the Russians created the problems with race,
00:46:20.300
of course not. But do they exploit them? Absolutely. And are other countries also other rogue and
00:46:27.660
authoritarian nation states seeking to do the same? Absolutely. Russia is the best at this kind of
00:46:34.000
information warfare. But other countries are learning quickly. And what's been really interesting
00:46:38.980
for me to watch is, for example, how China has taken an aggressive new interest in pursuing similar
00:46:47.500
disinformation campaigns in Western information spaces. This was something that they didn't do until
00:46:54.600
about last year when the protests started in Hong Kong, and then obviously this year with COVID.
00:46:59.300
I think you say in your book that Russian television, RT, is the most watched news channel
00:47:07.080
on YouTube? Yes, it is. So this is another example to me of how quick they were to recognize that the
00:47:17.420
architecture of this new information ecosystem, right, which developed over the turn of the millennium,
00:47:21.940
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