00:00:52.860And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.680I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.260Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.820These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.640Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.260If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.640Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:01:45.360Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:51.260There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:02:03.540I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.0.98
00:02:09.240Someone, probably a guy in a basement somewhere, has figured out that if you generate a black woman1.00
00:02:15.280and make her say degrading, racist things about herself, you can make money on the internet.0.94
00:02:21.260Probably not a lot of money, maybe just a few hundred dollars a month, but enough to keep on doing it.
00:02:27.840TikTok, Instagram, and every other social media platform, they're serving it up on your social media feed right now.
00:02:34.960It's AI-generated digital blackface, and it is absolutely everywhere on social media.
00:02:41.280There are accounts built entirely around it.0.99
00:02:43.640Fake Black women with impossibly dark skin, performing self-hatred, and funneling viewers to things like porn sites and dropshipping scams.0.96
00:02:52.980So this is not one of those future AI problems we might have to grapple with down the line.0.96
00:04:15.440When I created my pages in June of last year, the main reason was that a lot of the ways people were talking about AI video,
00:04:24.100they were pretending that these were tools for my industry, like the one that I knew people in,
00:04:28.820the one that i didn't see many good uses for in general so i just wanted to speak up and be like
00:04:34.480hey no one really wants this like we're not asking for this stop using the industry as a reason to
00:04:40.940push out ai slot making tools just be honest that you're making ai slop or you're trying to maybe
00:04:46.360replace hollywood uh down the line but i i felt like a lot of it was just either inauthentic or
00:04:53.420like very, very rose colored glasses that people were going to start making independent films with
00:04:59.140AI videos. And in fact, a lot of the opposite has happened. A lot of people who are true creatives
00:05:04.760have rejected this, but it has definitely encroached on transactional spaces. And I spent a
00:05:10.920lot of my time in places of, you know, video commerce where a lot of that is kind of under
00:05:16.500threat by AI. So that's one of the reasons I started was I just felt like a lot of that was
00:05:20.640disingenuous or or too rosy but the the technical background i have i had no idea that this is what
00:05:27.060it would be used for um when i was a live streaming technical producer i was also what they call an
00:05:31.800engineer in charge which means sometimes i would have to like visually check check lip sync like
00:05:38.260very very specific thing down to like a frame of of accuracy i didn't know that would come in handy
00:05:43.860for looking at AI lip sync later or looking at errors in encoding and video would come
00:05:50.900into play when I was looking at AI videos. So yeah, it's a very weird niche skill set, but
00:05:56.560that plus my obsession with internet culture and politics kind of brought it to a more
00:06:03.300media literacy place rather than just spotting AI video. Because I think that AI video spotting is
00:06:10.260a part of a media literacy toolkit that some people don't have. So in that case, they should
00:06:17.120have other parts of a media literacy toolkit because it's going to get harder and harder.
00:06:21.200I'm not under any illusion that people are going to be able to do this for that much longer.
00:06:26.700This is a little bit of a non sequitur, but to your point about how when AI video tools like
00:06:32.860Sora were being talked about, I don't know if you see this on your social media feeds,
00:06:38.000but i cannot escape it and it drives me fucking crazy where ai sycophant i guess like uh dito
00:06:46.340taze will say did xyz ai platform just end the need for hollywood or cgi and then they will post0.89
00:06:56.720the wackest looking most out of context ridiculous video and i'm like are you all are you seeing what
00:07:04.140you posted you're saying that this is going to like like like this is what people are going to0.77
00:07:09.280pay to watch are you are you are you really saying this so there there are two things here first like
00:07:14.640the whole hollywood is cooked thing is so funny because hollywood's not exactly like a burgeoning
00:07:19.200profitable industry right now just like stick to tech like why are you trying to to enter this
00:07:24.940like industry that is being threatened in so many different ways so just the obsession with hollywood
00:07:29.800as like a cultural phenomenon is just so funny to me especially like the anti-hollywood people
00:07:33.520I'm not a big Hollywood person, by the way. I'm a social media person. I've never worked in
00:07:36.820Hollywood. I just think the fascination is funny because I specifically wasn't working in Hollywood
00:07:42.280because I didn't think it was the place to be. Anyway, and that's nothing against the people
00:07:47.100who love movies. It's just not how I grew up. The other thing that is missing here is
00:07:52.800we have to ask ourselves why we watch things and why we would watch that in the context that
00:08:00.640they're presenting it so like why would you go to a movie theater to watch something if ai could
00:08:06.560make anything then theoretically nothing really matters on like aesthetic grounds and it's all
00:08:12.700about the meaning that it would have and if if you can't get that meaning out of the artistic work
00:08:19.660that was put in or even like the celebrity that you like going to see like then what is the point
00:08:24.700and i don't think that they've thought that far ahead i think there are a lot of useful tech demos
00:08:28.960But they haven't gotten a good way around that point, which is if you can make that at home on your desktop, then why would anyone go watch it in the first place? It doesn't mean anything. So it's a little bit of like a problem. It's like a zero sum game. We have too much content out there. How do we decide what we want to watch? It's not just because it looks like Hollywood. It's because it means something or we have some sort of connection to it.
00:08:55.940Yeah, it doesn't mean anything is a great way to put that, where I'll watch these clips that people are telling me are so phenomenal, and I feel nothing. They just feel so flat. And I, my listeners all know I am a movie person. And it's like, the thing that I feel when I go to the movies, it's like a very specific thing. It's not just, I guess the attitude that boils that down into, hey, I made this very quickly and cheaply. That's not the thing that gives anything meaning.
00:09:24.300yeah and just just to be clear i like to say that i'm not a movie person because i've seen
00:09:29.220an embarrassing few number of movies okay i still love like seeing movies sometimes i just like
00:09:33.640whenever you know there's like i'm embarrassed by it um the whenever i go though is because i
00:09:39.280really want to see something i really want to watch it and um you know that doesn't just come
00:09:44.220because of like some impressive technical feat that happened um you know i i just i i don't think
00:09:50.980that we do a good job of separating like why we watch certain things because i think the the
00:09:56.200natural tendency is like well people just doom scroll they watch slop so like yeah but like we're
00:10:00.900not watching we haven't been watching social media videos in movie theaters this whole time like
00:10:04.880the the the bar to to create things has never been lower it was never lower before ai media like we
00:10:11.720were still figuring out reasons to watch something on our phone versus something in the theater
00:10:15.480there weren't a lot of movies coming out that like specifically used iphone cameras even though they
00:10:20.320are way cheaper because you have to rejigger your entire workflow around an iphone camera you have
00:10:26.160to remake your entire workflow around ai video production if you're going to do that because
00:10:31.340you can't cut between a 4k cinema camera and a 720p ai video that's what all of them still are
00:10:37.720by the way then you can pay extra for 1080p or 4k but they still look like ai videos when you're
00:10:42.860especially if you're looking at them on a big screen so there are technical limitations to
00:10:46.620is happening. There are also like meaning relationships that just like aren't being
00:10:50.800made with AI videos. But I think a lot of people who are super into it are just like they're into
00:10:54.740the AI hype, they're into the technology. So they just don't see that because for them,
00:10:59.260the purpose here is the technology. That's like, that's the entire point. I just don't think
00:11:03.380normal people do that. I don't know if this is true or not, Jeremy, but I read that you actually
00:11:09.040started from a place of being quite optimistic about AI and that initially you wanted to do
00:11:14.460a youtube channel about kind of how people can use ai video tools is that right i read it in verge
00:11:20.360i think yeah it just that was before google vo3 even came out i mean it was basically like i chose
00:11:27.520the my my pages used to be called show tools ai because i was i was gonna make shows with tools
00:11:33.140and some of those are gonna be ai very witty except for the fact that like google came out
00:11:37.320with vo this the week that i was gonna launch my page i had to like stop everything i was doing
00:11:43.620and being like what is happening here um and yeah i it's i wasn't really ever thinking that i was
00:11:51.460going to use like ai video to make movies i was more interested in how it could be used for
00:11:58.940storyboards maybe or how it could use be used for green screen backgrounds or stuff and you can
00:12:03.860actually see me experiment with some of that and like try it out in my like my early days and i was
00:12:09.200very, very upfront with it. I disclosed all of it. I was trying to be the demonstrator of how to
00:12:15.140label and do this responsibly. And then I just realized it just didn't really mean anything to
00:12:20.480me at the end of the day. I didn't find it was that helpful. And I just hated the process. I
00:12:24.780just hated prompting AI videos. And I still do. I just think it's boring. I think it is
00:12:30.740not an efficient way to make media. I think that there's a lot of reasons why you can't
00:12:35.100um you can't convey an entire scene over text and you do have to have some like visual medium to
00:12:42.060tell that's like just more efficient for me i don't know i can point the camera at something
00:12:46.580in some ways quicker than i can write it given you know the right context so um you know the the
00:12:53.480the reason that hollywood works the way it does and the reason they haven't moved over to a phone
00:12:59.020is because this is harder to use in the context that they are making movies they need more control
00:23:45.000They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:23:49.460But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:23:52.920They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:23:56.540Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:04.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:24:10.920This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:24:23.400I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:24:30.500I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:24:33.640From best-selling authors and your favorite BookTok creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:24:40.040It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:24:47.940Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:24:57.120Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:27:25.460So that's what Angel told Jeremy, and I really understand how she feels.
00:27:30.100In a collaborative investigation with the BBC, Jeremy worked to uncover 100 social media accounts that depict the likenesses of Black women through AI-generated characters.
00:27:40.660TikTok took action and removed some of these accounts from their platform, and I'm really glad they did.
00:27:46.240But Jeremy says that doing work like this sometimes just feels weird because the content is so deeply racist and exploitative and gross.
00:27:54.940But he's also very aware that it isn't really his pain to bear, like it is for Black women like me and Angel.
00:28:02.040Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this, and I wasn't even sure how to ask this.
00:28:06.960We have been talking about digital blackface for a very long time, both AI-generated and other kinds of what I would consider to be digital blackface.
00:28:14.740We did an episode about it way back when in 2022 where this like AI generated rapper named FN Mecca was released. We had a whole conversation about it when Sora and VO3 were being used to create the skits that I think you and I would probably agree are like essentially digital minstrel shows. We did an episode about it.
00:28:32.740I, I don't know. I, I, in my opinion, that especially when VO3 and Sora were becoming things, that was like an urgent moment to me. I was like, this is we need to like, have this conversation. And I was kind of surprised that that did that moment did not get the traction as like an urgent change that I would have thought it would.
00:28:56.920And when I came across your videos, I was like quite thrilled to see them getting such traction, especially the videos that are about, you know, race and the way that black women are depicted in these things.
00:29:07.620And I guess my question, and I'm not even sure if this is something you could speak to, but do you think there is an element of like, who is the messenger here?
00:29:16.620Because I wonder if like me as a Black woman saying these these videos make me feel X, Y, Z, these videos are trafficking and X, Y, Z, misogynistic, racist trope.
00:29:28.560I think that there's something where a lot of people can just be like, oh, it's just Black women complaining about something again.
00:29:34.540And then when you speak about it, not just from the perspective of a white man, but also somebody who, you know, has this technical background, like in your Substack piece,
00:29:44.820You really break down like the color gradients of why the kinds of skin that is depicted in some of these videos is actually impossible and what that means.
00:29:53.780I am really grateful and happy that you are talking about this and amplifying it.
00:30:00.380But I wonder if like if there's a good thing with the messenger there where it's more people are more like, oh, well, this kind of technical guy is saying it.
00:30:13.440I also am very uncomfortable with that because like, I know that's why I'd, so I'll say I
00:30:19.460actually have not talked about this. This is a great time to do it. So the way that I found out
00:30:23.740about, um, the, well, not found out. So I, I had seen other, uh, the, the AI generated sexualized
00:30:32.660black women before, and I feel uncomfortable talking about it because I think that the
00:30:37.260depiction is quite harmful. Um, and what actually made me write that article was I had a young
00:30:44.940woman who she's black and she had found a lot of these accounts and she sent them and she's
00:30:49.160credited in the piece. Her name's Angel Nalani. And, um, I was really thankful that she was there
00:30:55.780because she was able to be like the emotional core. And like, I wasn't, I didn't feel like I
00:31:02.120was like taking advantage of something. Cause I felt really bad. Like, I don't want to get views
00:31:06.120on something exploitative i don't like i i do feel like a discomfort here and and i think that
00:31:13.060it's a discomfort on so many levels it's all new it's like this is this is all like quite new like
00:31:18.340the technology layer obviously uh you know racist depictions and digital blackface aren't anything
00:31:23.240new but like this is a new kind of intersection of like technology and and race and and so i think
00:31:30.240it's like a really difficult thing to navigate so the reason i'm answering this way is like i agree
00:31:34.600that there's something there i i struggle to navigate it because i really don't want to be
00:31:40.140taking advantage of these stories any more than i should be i would love other people to talk about
00:31:45.880it and i you know my opportunity to platform angel is someone who like i want you to be in this piece
00:31:51.480because like you came to me like this is personally affecting you you told me that this is a difficult
00:31:56.300thing for you to go through like i want to like pay you to do this so that like you can be a part
00:32:01.520this and like i don't think that's like i'm not doing that to like pat myself on the back or
00:32:05.560something i'm just like i'm aware of the discomfort there and it doesn't like it i'm very very meta
00:32:12.460aware of this i think that just kind of a nature like i i'm very careful about like um you know
00:32:19.580the language and it's actually it keeps me from making a lot of videos sometimes it like definitely
00:32:24.640puts a pause because i don't want to uh make the problem worse by showing more depictions when we
00:32:29.960did the story that you're referencing, we went through a ton of different variations on if we
00:32:36.700were even going to show the depictions, how we were going to show them. When we worked at the
00:32:42.980BBC, the BBC decided not to name any of these accounts. We decided to name the accounts.
00:32:50.980That's a difference in how we decided harm could be done, right? The BBC decided that
00:32:55.500by directing people to these, it could be harmful. Whereas I wanted to call them out. And, um, and
00:33:01.560so I think that there just isn't one answer and I'm seeing, I'm seeing those, uh, things all play
00:33:07.220out in real time and navigating them and just kind of doing my best. But I, I agree. And I do hope
00:33:12.780that, um, you know, I can provide any sort of platform I can to people who aren't white men to,
00:33:18.400to help because it's it's not it really is like uh ai is very good at making a lot of identities
00:33:25.540really quickly it's going to impact a lot of different types of people yeah it was really
00:33:30.740clear from the piece the intention and care and thought that you would put into kind of framing
00:33:35.820it and it is like just a tough growth thing to have to talk about yeah the quotes from angel i
00:33:43.340thought really were so resonant she says like i'm terrified to think there's a little black girl
00:33:47.480somewhere feeling as terrible as I do right now because some guy in Malta wanted to make three
00:33:51.380euro a month or you know they make us seem so ugly but we're so beautiful like all of these
00:33:56.740I just was really moved by a lot of what she had to say and so I'm grateful that her voice was
00:34:03.640included in the like throughout the piece and it's just is very clear that you all are taking
00:34:07.700very intentional steps to talk about something that is like sensitive and tough and thorny to
00:34:15.220talk about because i don't feel like everybody would be a lot of people would be like what a
00:34:19.660scoop can't wait to get a million views on this tiktok about horrible racist ugly depictions of
00:34:26.860black women i i also there are similar things happening um with um the way that children are
00:34:34.460depicted online that have been very troubling for me um a lot of stuff related to like frankly
00:34:40.280um uh there was one like example i could give and this is not this is not to say that someone is
00:34:46.580doing this the wrong way or right way i'm just i'm just like stating the difference that i would
00:34:49.760cover and how i would cover it like um there were a lot of ai depictions of girls with jeffrey
00:34:56.560epstein that got a lot of views by people on instagram who were like pointing out at me like
00:35:02.680this is wrong and like i don't feel comfortable doing that i just i don't i don't feel like
00:35:07.980there's a responsible way for me to cover that. And so like when I was doing, when I did videos
00:35:13.620about the piece we're talking about, like I decided to blur them all out because I don't
00:35:17.860want to be trafficking them the same like shock value that a lot of these have. Like there is a
00:35:21.660lot of shock value here. And I think that's unfair. But again, I don't think that there's
00:35:26.900one right or wrong way to do it. I think that it depends who your audience is and what your angle
00:35:32.200is. Thanks to Jeremy's investigation alongside the BBC, within three days, TikTok banned 20 of
00:35:39.900the 37 accounts that his team found pumping out this racist AI-generated content. TikTok also
00:35:46.440applied AI-generated labels to the videos that Jeremy and his colleagues pointed out.
00:35:51.880So we're talking about this investigation you did with the BBC. From that investigation,
00:35:56.280tick tock banned 20 accounts for using these ai generated black women influencers to drive to1.00
00:36:03.320sites some of them were driving to like porn sites where you could then pay like pay for porn
00:36:08.640um the accounts are they're upsetting i guess i'll say but they they're overtly racist yeah
00:36:15.540they're overtly bad yeah and a lot of the comments a lot of the the posts will kind of
00:36:22.240use these like race play terms like the the the post will be like I love white men and things
00:36:28.660like that um I it just it's clear to me what's going on but I think to your point it's one of
00:36:38.820those things that like it's difficult to talk about like oh someone has figured out that using
00:36:44.160super racist depictions of black women might generate clicks back to this pay porn site and
00:36:49.760to the point that you made earlier there's certainly you know adult content that is super0.97
00:36:55.040racist and horrible and violent but the idea that you can create that kind of content without a
00:37:00.640human right so like all of the harm that you that would be resulting of that you could do that
00:37:06.220without any person signing up and consenting and being like okay i'll do this like you can just
00:37:10.660make it quickly and cheaply you can i there does still have to be a human in the loop right now
00:37:16.140just to be clear so like i think we still have to remember that but there are very few and so it
00:37:22.120just takes one person rather than a team of people and someone to be like this probably isn't the
00:37:27.360right thing to do um and then there are people who are just intentionally making racist depictions
00:37:32.920and know it and they don't care and this is a very cynical way to just to view how to use these tools
00:37:38.760and so i you know i think that there there are different types of accounts that's something else
00:37:43.220I wanted to say like there are accounts that are run internationally that are not as overtly racist and they really are just using like a black woman's likeness, which is problematic, but they aren't doing anything different than a similar white character that they might be running.
00:37:58.920So they're just like running different identities. But, you know, so there were there were a gamut, you know, we found like 136 different accounts and they weren't all the same, but there were a lot of trends for sure.
00:38:09.840And I would say that probably over a third were overtly racist and over a half were suggestive or at least like dabbled in race play terminology in some sort of direct way.
00:38:24.760And then there were some that were just like way too far, even even for Instagram and Instagram didn't take his money down, but Instagram took a few down that were extremely problematic, too.
00:38:34.620So, yeah, there were there were a lot of them, but they had a lot of the same patterns.
00:38:38.440Do you have a sense of where videos like this originate from in the world?
00:38:43.860Everywhere. It is an international problem. We did track across, I think it was five different continents. I think Australia wasn't included and Antarctica wasn't included. So those are the only two not included.
00:38:56.880um it was pretty what it was pretty wide ranging i would say i think i'll um a lot of people will
00:39:04.420make assumptions but this is something that anyone can do from really anywhere in the world
00:39:10.300and um there were operations runs so there were accounts that were run by content farms and there
00:39:17.980were um you know solo accounts it's a pretty wide range so i try not to to pin it down anywhere but
00:39:24.740you can get location data from Instagram, especially if they let you see it. And those
00:39:30.680can be spoofed too. So it's not always the most accurate, but it at least tells you that there's
00:39:34.720a range. Let me ask you this. So I know that TikTok did take down a lot of these accounts.
00:39:40.280Instagram was like, we're looking into it. What explains the difference there?
00:39:47.440so tiktok will uh so tiktok actually cited exactly the policy that they broke and they
00:39:56.060were very direct about it and part of the difference is that instagram doesn't have as
00:40:01.300directive language about this in their policies and their terms of service um their inauthentic
00:40:07.380media is more protecting real people from being deep faked or copied whereas tiktok takes a
00:40:14.180broader view of inauthentic behavior. Uh, so that's, that's the first difference. The second
00:40:19.900difference is that Instagram is just generally where a lot of this content is. And that's because
00:40:26.340it is more permissible of it. So like there were, I think 96 accounts that we tracked on Instagram
00:40:34.040and it might've been 36 on Tik TOK or something along those lines. And like the fact that we
00:40:41.200reported more of them and few of them got taken down on Instagram is also why there are more on
00:40:45.940Instagram. So it's a little bit of like a, uh, a self replicating cycle there that Instagram has
00:40:52.000built. Um, that also means ironically that videos I do about it do better on Instagram too. So it's
00:40:58.980like, it's affecting everyone. If I, if I make a video that includes so much as like an AI woman0.99
00:41:05.420wearing a bikini, I have to blur that on Tik TOK. Otherwise it'll, it'll get shadow, you know,0.64
00:41:10.160deprioritized, right? These are just things we're aware of as creators. So it is consistent with
00:41:16.620how they each run their platform. I think that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, that makes sense to
00:41:21.000me. Just as someone who has covered a lot of meta and their policies and how they abide by or don't
00:41:26.320abide by those policies, what you're saying really checks out to me, I guess. Checks out. Yeah, I
00:41:31.640didn't have to think that hard about it. It was consistent. Consistent, that's a good way to put
00:41:35.640it. One of the videos that you talked about in the piece took a real model from Malaysia and then
00:41:42.120gives her that impossibly dark skin using AI. And just as a Black woman, to me, it almost feels0.98
00:41:49.540like it is using technology to create this impossible standard of beauty where it's a0.97
00:41:56.260woman who is not Black, who has, of course, has non-Black features, but then has not just dark0.81
00:42:04.420skin but like impossibly dark skin and i guess i just feel that it's really is using technology0.96
00:42:10.920to create these people that cannot exist but but of course like also then sets an existing beauty
00:42:17.680standard despite that standard being impossible yeah i got so frustrated and that's why i actually
00:42:23.340did the whole thing about actually detecting the undertones to prove that these skin tones were
00:42:28.700impossibly black because people would be like oh no there really are people that with that dark
00:42:33.520of pigmentation i'm like no there aren't like the they have no undertones and i actually like
00:42:38.160i actually found the people they were talking about and i put them on vectorscopes i'm like
00:42:42.320i can tell there's a scientific difference here there is there is a difference and um you know
00:42:48.100it's like the the models that would create these are open source models um so they don't have the
00:42:54.060guardrails to prevent you from doing this anyway i don't know if there are guardrails i haven't i
00:42:59.060haven't tried to make many impossibly black characters i'm not very interested in doing it
00:43:03.460um i don't know if you're allowed to do it on like google's ais for example i could probably test it
00:43:10.000but the ones that they were using are open source anyway that can create sexual content like
00:43:15.920sora um which is closing down soon uh vo um even like uh mid journey like these these like big
00:43:24.660names have guardrails. So they're using open source models that are a little bit less high
00:43:29.960quality, but can make sexual content. So it's, they're much harder to stop.
00:44:45.300when I was 14 years old I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months I survived and I've spent
00:44:52.980my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them I'm Elizabeth Smart
00:44:59.020and these are the survivor files I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying
00:45:06.660shut up don't say anything every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable
00:45:14.140I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.0.75
00:45:18.600I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:45:26.220They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:45:30.120But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:45:33.560They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:45:36.680Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:45:45.640If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:45:51.580This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:46:04.040I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
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00:46:37.780Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:53:22.500But like a lot of those people are coming over to the AI product space and vibe coding apps and stuff like that.
00:53:29.440So, yeah, I absolutely agree. That's that's the kind of vibe it has to me.
00:53:32.700And of course, it always comes down to the thing that you flagged as the piece that worries you is how can we underpay and undercut human labor?
00:53:41.140How can we disrespect human labor? I hate that that's always what it comes back to.
00:53:46.220But that does seem to be what it always comes back to.
00:53:48.560yeah and and again i would just remind people that like people do like working with other people
00:53:55.340and like i think small businesses are you know going to keep working with other people a lot
00:53:59.860of the bigger corporations i'd be probably a little bit more worried about if if i were them
00:54:04.600but um i mean it's going to happen like natural like technology will keep happening and i think
00:54:10.120it is unclear if this is actually just to be clear moving faster than any other like normal
00:54:15.160technology would do in so far as like how it's impacting labor. A lot of like layoffs that are
00:54:20.680being done are done in the name of AI, but are really efficiency cuts maybe from over hiring of
00:54:26.540COVID. Like, I don't know these things. They're not transparent about it. I think it's very
00:54:31.880likely that AI will have a massive impact on labor. I think that that is, I mean, almost
00:54:38.520guaranteed at this point, if I'm being honest. And yet, like, I think that it will also go by
00:54:43.800many names. They might be more excited to call things AI because that does have usually positive
00:54:51.300benefits to their stock value. So we just have to be careful not to overhype it even when it is a
00:54:56.720real risk. Very well put. And I've heard you mention that you think that AI detection will
00:55:02.740eventually be outpaced by AI quality improvements. I don't know if this is a question that you can
00:55:07.760answer, but how urgent is that window? What needs to happen before that window closes?
00:55:13.800um so i don't think that software detection is going to save us here at least not in the next
00:55:19.340few years and i think that people assume it will i don't know why except for the fact that they're
00:55:25.760used to software solving their problems but there's no indication that we're really that
00:55:31.180close here if i'm being honest like ai photo detection is not that good ai video detection
00:55:36.200is very bad right now uh you still have media literacy tells right now that are very helpful
00:55:41.820And if you're a platform, like you have access to that data and you should probably take it more seriously, in my opinion, but their moderation is so under resourced that they're not doing that. So there's like a lot of problems kind of all converging at once. But I think that we have an opportunity right now to figure out what is real or not, like a little bit more on a day to day basis. And as AI video and photo keeps improving, it's just going to keep getting harder. I'm just like trying to be realist about that.
00:56:11.120So I would like platforms to take it more seriously now because it is technically still a little bit possible and we don't know where it's going to be in the future.
00:56:18.460I don't think that it's going to be completely undetectable anytime soon, but that's not really what I'm worried about.
00:56:24.380I'm more worried about it making people believe that real things aren't real en masse than anything else.
00:56:32.580Yeah. I mean, I guess to sort of wrap it up here, I think that you often are kind of seen as like the AI deepfake spotter debunker guy on the internet. But as you mentioned, it's really more of a broader set of media literacy tools. Do you have tips for what folks should be looking out for?
00:56:54.440full disclosure i've admitted it on the podcast i turns out i have a real uh blind spot for ai
00:57:01.900generated animal videos and i've kind of been put in group chat time out because my friends are like
00:57:09.020it's ai girl are you not seeing this those bunnies are not jumping on this guy's tummy it's fake
00:57:13.780so yeah give us some tips for what we can do to be a little bit sharper when it comes to media
00:57:18.840literacy given all of this so the first is i think reposts accounts are pretty much dead to me i just
00:57:27.940don't think that they're useful anymore i think they're really likely to repost ai content right
00:57:33.760now um and part of the reason is that if you're not getting like algorithms make it possible to
00:57:40.240just get things from original sources like you don't need another reposter to curate your algorithm
00:57:44.640them for you um that's that's one thing uh the second is that uh and this goes to a little bit
00:57:51.660of like why right now is important is even if uh ai videos get much better in the coming months
00:57:59.560that means that accounts are going to have to keep like updating their content deleting their
00:58:04.280old stuff that's more obviously ai so as of now a lot of deceptive ai accounts are less than four
00:58:11.820months old or you can scroll back to their old content and be like okay that's more clearly ai
00:58:16.820generated if you were ever good at spotting it before if you weren't good at spotting it before
00:58:20.800then that might not be that helpful for you um and the other thing is just really spend more time
00:58:27.440watching like people and creators you trust rather than having the algorithm decide for you because
00:58:32.240the algorithm can't figure out what's real any better than you can right now so um i think like
00:58:38.320I spend probably less time watching AI videos than other people because I watch more long-form
00:58:42.720content and less long-form content is AI-generated. Unless it's faceless YouTube, there are
00:58:48.460exceptions. Unless it's your AI-generated podcast that we were talking about. But I'm really looking
00:58:54.760for people I trust and following people I trust and trying to tailor my recommendation algorithms
00:58:59.040to that as well. If you think about it as more of a people problem, it becomes more manageable.
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01:00:50.660If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
01:00:56.780Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discord.
01:01:05.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture
01:01:08.560with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.