Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Taylor Barkley, Director of public Policy
for the Abundance Institute. Taylor joins us to talk about
artificial intelligence in US elections, particular the regulation of AIS.
Some truly remarkable times these with some very concerning legislation
for defenders of the First Amendment and free speech. Taylor,
thank you so much for joining us today on this
episode of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here. Matt, thanks so much for
having me on.
Speaker 1: Well, it looks like Congress won't be passing any legislation
on this front before election day. I mean by that
artificial intelligence regulation as it relates to elections. You note
that Congressional inaction is quite okay and a relief because
many of these bills pose significant free speech issues.
Speaker 2: I want to get.
Speaker 1: Into the bills before Congress now, but I think the
vote pressing issue at this point is what happened in California.
My colleague Tristan Justice writes at the Federal List. California's
far left governor celebrated Constitution Day with a series of
new laws to quote cracked down on free speech articulated
via artificially generated content. On Tuesday, the California Democrat governor
officially outlawed the creation and distribution of images or videos
created with artificial intelligence known as deep fakes. Let's begin there.
What does this new law do and how will this
impact the election and ultimately free speech?
Speaker 2: These are all great questions, and I think my top
line here takeaway is that AI and election policies are
problems in search of problems. As you mentioned, and I'm
glad you kine Of wrote that article, every level of
government is looking at this issue. There's an SCC proceeding
right now regulating they would seek to regulate AI and
political advertisements. The deadline to submit comments, actually unpreceding is today.
If any member of the public can submit a comment
on these proposed regulations. Congress is proceeding and is unlikely
to pass anything. And then in the states, there's been
there have been numerous laws passed, and I think I
counted twenty different states have passed different laws, as you mentioned,
yet California was the most recent. I'll also add on
you know, one of the reasons Governor Newsom was so
eager to sign these bills into law was because he
noticed a parody Kamala Harris video in the summer, and
it was famous for you know, quote tweeting it and saying,
I'm eager to sign legislation that would prevent this kind
of thing. Turns out he did, and then those bills.
He signed those bills into law. I think it was yesterday.
The creator of that parody of video sued the government
of California for First and fourteenth Amendment violations because, as
you mentioned, there are just tremendous free speech implications here
for a number of reasons. I mean, you know, first
of all, you know, it's the constitution permits uh, you know,
say fake fake speech, maybe not outright fraud, but in
some cases just has to be narrowly tailored. But you know,
we can say, uh, you know, fanciful things about even
real people in history. Uh, there's the Constitution protects such speech.
And a lot of these laws, including the three Bills
of the Governor's signed in California, are are written in
such a way that could just open the floodgates for
privolous litigation on say, you know there's a upstart candidate
who you know, uses AI generated content to do just
very like normal things, say make campaign posters, or even
doesn't use AI to generate images or content. And the
incumb Uh, the incumbent candidate could well well funded, connected
to the right people, could sue this this challenger or
just to tie them up, you have them spend more
money than they should and you know, either you know,
tank their likelihood of getting elected because they're busy chasing
down these frivolous lawsuits or not speaking as much as
they would otherwise because out of fear of maybe getting
these kind of potentially game ending lawsuits filed against them.
Speaker 1: The chilling of speech. You know, that is a big
part list as well. Again, as my colleague get the
Federalist Tristan Justice wrote newsome as you noted, sign two
other pieces of legislation requiring campaigns and social media platforms
to disclose whether their content was created with artificial intelligence.
And this is what you were getting into before. And
I think this is hilarious. For everybody will have a
different view about the content, but I thought that. I
thought the AI ad with Kamala Harris is absolutely hilarious
and quite frankly, I knew it was a joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: Most most people get sarcasm, they get parody, you know,
they get you know, they know what weird Al Yankovic
has done the popular music over the years. For the
look I got, most people get satire, and that's exactly
what it was. But you know, for us of a
certain philosophical, political, philosophical point of view, that stuff seemed
to ring true in any ways about Kamala Harris and
where she is at with her policies. But I got
first and foremost the fact that it was a satire
and b that it was you know, protected speech but
no longer in California. So elon Musk comes out. I
remember that a lot of this stuff, isn't it driven
by Musk? Actually, you know, pushing this out there, this
this artificial intelligence ad out there and making all of
these threats. Now he's come through on those well. In July,
Musk announced that he would relocate his headquarters for two
of his companies from California to Texas because you know,
he was being basically with these bills targeted for free speech.
He said, it's hard to be a free speech platform
in a state that wants to ban free speech. Isn't
that where we're at right now? With these new laws
in place?
Speaker 2: That seems to be the case. And you know when
I said this is, you know, these policies and these
these laws are problems in search of problems. I'm going
to get the second problem, and this issue of AI
and elections is not really the prognostications and dire predictions
have not come to be. They have not they have
not proven true. And at the Abundance Institute, my team
and I we've been tracking every single media mentioned using
AI machine learning tools, every single media mention of say
US election, AI, Biden, Trump, Harris, you know a number
of keywords and your listeners can actually access the full
database at AI Election Observatory dot com. And we have
some of our writeups and summarizing our findings in multi
part series that we've been doing over the course of
the year at our substack now and next dot substack.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great cury, it really is. This is
the third in the fourth it's a four part series,
I believe. I think this is the third installment, correct.
Speaker 2: That's correct. Yeah, And I will have the fourth I
believe around October sixth which will be around thirty that
will be thirty days until the November fifth election, and
we'll have an after election kind of analysis. And we've
been writing these as just you know, whatever happens, we
want to log it because since I've been writing about
this issue of you know, deep fakes and you know
truths and elections a bit always come into it since
about twenty nineteen, and you know every election since then
has been you know, the last kind of human election
twenty twenty two, twenty twenty four. And you know, we
did these this tracker just to have the receipts. So
what has actually happened. And you know, we're in our
comment which we're filing in this FCC proceeding, we we
we say we have thirty five thousand media mentions about
AI and US election instances, but only four actual instances
of political campaigns using AI generated content. And you know,
even the most famous, arguably the most effective perhaps example
of AI generated content the Biden robocall in New Hampshire
earlier this year, where he robot Biden apparently call called
a number of a few thousand residents in New Hampshire
telling them to not turn up at the polls during
the primary, and according to testimony from the New Hampshire
Elections commissioner, it was the highest turnout ever. And this
robocall ended up being driven by a political activist who
lived out of state and wanted to make a point
and is now being fined six million dollars by the
Federal Communications Commission. But even that, right, it was you know,
supposedly of the more effective means and method didn't impact.
There was no discernible effect. Voters still turned out to vote.
And we see that time and time again, and I
think there's this overestimation and how easy it is to
deceive people. In many cases, the bottleneck is often on
distribution of this material. And you know, you mentioned Elon
Musk sharing the Kamala Harris parity video, and I think
that's an interesting example where you know, maybe if Musk
given his platform the attention he receives from politicians like
Gavin Newsom. Maybe this Kamala Harris parity video wouldn't have
gotten the attention it did, but you know, you you
shared it, You've got a lot of attention. That's where
we see this. I think the other problem with these
policies come in we have the lawmakers all over the
nation at all levels thing, you know, we have to
do something, and that's that's where so many of these
concerns about free speech come in. You know, a lot
of these like the bills in California requiring platforms to
label content. So now you have to now the owner
onus is on a platform to look through every single picture,
audio file, video to make a determination within you know,
a reasonable amount of time whether it's AI generated or
was it not, and then label it. And of course
this is just California and not a nationwide law, so
there's incredible compliance burdens there. There's also just potential to
muddy the waters, like if everything, if things are over labeled,
then maybe that can create its own kind of falsehoods
and issues, and you know, we could see you know,
speech slowed down, It could take longer for things to
get posted, frivolous lawsuits will fly because you know who
doesn't like suing the big tech companies for whatever reason
on whatever side. And we just go on down the list, Matt,
of all the all the troubling issues with these bills.
And but you know, I really want to hammer home
for your listeners. You know the dominant narrative out there
that AI generated generative AI is going to ruin democracy,
the death of democracy. That story is not proving true.
And it's you know, traditional methods are still out there
of missing disinformation, and politicians are way overreacting and in
most ninety nine percent of the cases that I've.
Speaker 3: Seen, we have a huge hole in our nation's roof.
The Watched Out on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski
every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and
the economy and how it affects your wallet. There should
be only one priority for our lawmakers. America is spending
three eight billion dollars a day in paying off our
own interest. You only need to be voting for candidates
who can address this problem. Whether it's happening in DC
or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed,
check out the Watchdowt on Wall Street podcast with Chris
Markowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: That's what they do in ninety nine percent of the cases,
no matter what. So we can we can apply that
to just about anything. And isn't that that is the case?
I mean, the fire of AI over the last couple
of years in this country, particularly over the last six months,
has been, oh my gosh, we've got to do something,
We've got to do something. That's exactly what Gavin Newsom
is doing. I do believe. Of course, there are you know,
there are leftist agenda items within his conduct and his
movements on this front as well. But you know, that's
basically the case across the country. We have politicians, we
have policymakers, we have bureaucrats trying to do something, once again,
to regulate something, and that's a very dangerous place to be. Now.
Having said all of that, I will tell you this,
I'm not real thrilled about the technology. But then again,
I'm an old journalist. You know, I didn't start off
with a typewriter, certainly, but you know, I started out
when you couldn't go to the internet al Gore hadn't
invented it yet, and so you couldn't go to the
Internet to just basically get the information. It was a
skill to be a reporter. Now some of that is deteriorating,
and it's the impact it will have elsewhere, I think
is clearly it will be substantial. But you know what
I do like is I like the First Amendment, Love
the First Amendment, Love free speech. And I just see
this whole movement going on, the putting the fire out
of AI as yet another assault, the latest in a
multifront assault on the First Amendment, and it is coming
from the people who are supposed to be the defenders
of the First Amendment. In the Federalist story that I
had just mentioned, the AP has actually applauded the California
blueprint for killing free speech. As noted in the piece,
the new laws reaffirm California's position as a leader in
regulating AI in the US, especially in combating election deep fakes.
The AP reported the state was the first in the
US to ban manipulated videos and pictures related to elections
in twenty nineteen. Measures in technology and AI proposed by
California lawmakers have been used as as blueprints for legislators
across the country. Industry experts said, and again, this is
the AP reporting what is happening out there. But it
seems to me that there are a lot of folks
in journalism, particularly corporate journalism, that are leading this story
as well. Are you tracking that?
Speaker 2: That does make sense? You know, it's a typical pattern
with emerging technologies. You know, emerging technologies often have the
effect of challenging incumbent power or entrenched interests, whatever they
might be. You know, the printing press did this, Digital
computing has done this. You know, you think about your
automobiles up ending the buggy making, the buggy whip industry,
on on and on we could go, and you know,
there's this push and pull between industries and individuals who
have done things maybe one way, have certainly made their
livelihoods doing things another way, and then the maybe individuals
and companies that have new technology. So using the generative
AI as an example, I think it makes absolute sense.
You know that the AP would be for this because
you know what generative AI does is I believe and
I've seen it happen, you know, in my own life
and with others. It's democratized creative writing. It's democratized graphic
design in so many ways. I used Generative Google's new
notebook LM today to summarize a long paper I didn't
have time to read, and it actually converted it into
a podcast style interview between between two AI voices, and
it was a really helpful way to learn quickly about
this this paper that I didn't have time to sit
down and read. And we're seeing that that seems creepy
to me, but trying it out, yeah, it was pretty fun.
And yeah, but you know, there's room for everyone here, Matt, Like,
if you don't want to use it, that's fine, No, no, no.
Speaker 1: And don't And please don't get me wrong, just because
I'm creeped out by some of it doesn't mean as
a first of all, a free market capitalist, I'm I'm
here to stop the next wave of technology, the next
wave of innovation, and I certainly am not here to
stop the expression of of thought in this country. I
think we're in a dangerous place. Just because you know,
something creeps me out doesn't mean that I'm I'm here
to you know, push the administrative state to stop all
of this and to force you know, burden some regulations.
You know, I am I am burdened by what has
been to borrow a phrase from the Democrat presidential candidate,
I am burdened, and we all are burdened by what
has been in terms of regulation in this country. But
you know that that's what I'm seeing through through all
of this is this massive panic, this massive scare, and
what you are ultimately saying is even if you don't
care for the technology, the evidence doesn't support the knee
jerk reaction to it.
Speaker 2: That's correct, That's correct, because I think a lot of
this is motivated by these hypothetical scenarios. And that's like
we're even reading this FCC proposed rule, and they're their motivation.
It's it's hypothetical harms of and the Governor of California
even in his statement it's and the members of the
Assembly who supported these these bills. It's well, someday someone
will make a video of X Y politicians saying, you know,
such and such a thing, and that's going to be
the end of the world, or you know, cause some
sort of harm. And we had plenty of opportunities over
the last decade. I'll say, even just since twenty seventeen
for manipulated you know, AI generated content that's convincing enough
to cause harm. I think, you know, a key factor
of you know, even miss It will say, you know, disinformation.
This is someone you know who's creating information to to
sow you know, confusion or or cause harm. You know,
Donald Trump was perhaps maybe the best person because he
was so unpredictable. You know, we never know what he's
going to say next, and I think that is a
critical ingredient for disinformation. But no one, there was no instance.
I mean, people did create fake content with Donald Trump,
but nothing rose to the level of these these hypothetical
doom and gloom scenarios where say, you know, we went
to war with another country, or you know, half the
population decided not to go vote because they heard the
president say that the polls were closed or something like that.
That has not happened. It's really really hard to do
at that scale. Even though you know, yes, generative AI
has democratized kind of you know, top tier level graphic design,
video editing content, and it will only get better from here, Matt,
I think that that always goes into this prognostication it
will only get better from here, even with you know,
nation states who are well funded, well motivated, have the outreach.
There's nothing been, nothing has risen to this, this doom
and gloom level, and so it's discouraging to see policy
makers reacting and crafting policy which should never be done.
It should never be done from hypotheticals In most cases,
I'll say most cases, it should never be just based
purely and hypotheticals. Policy making should always be based in
the evidence. What has happened, what is the actual harm
a is trying to be prevented here, and what is
the best way to actually prevent that harm? In many
in most instances public policy, it's one tool in the toolbox.
I think that's one of my bugaboos. We have this
kneejerk reaction to say, oh, there's a problem in the world,
will we got to pass a law when you know,
I wrote this article for this new organization, the Center
for News, Technology and Innovation, based on this research is
tracking we've been doing or this article. You know, the
instances we've seen institutions, civil society journalists included have done
a good job about filtering out, you know, back from
fiction you will take. I think it was Ron DeSantis
campaign affiliated affiliate created what appeared to be some generative
AI images of I think Trump hung hugging Fauci, and
you know, journalists, uh, news sites sprung into action, fact
checking orgs sprung into action, citizens sprung into action, community
notes on X sprung into action, and it was you know,
everyone got involved and said, well, here's what actually happened,
and they provided the information to the public. Hey, just
an fyi, some of these appear AI generated, and that's
exactly what should be happening here. It shouldn't be bands,
it shouldn't be requirements and labeling. And you know, maybe,
you know, if you want to take it that we
can talk about just the issues of defining AI and
all the problems that creates. But you know, I think
that the machine is working, by my estimate, and we
need to trust people. We can trust people on so
much of this legislation and these regulations seems to be
motivated by this lack of trust. You know, people will
just be bamboozled if they see something fake, when that's
not been the case.
Speaker 1: Our guest today is Taylor Barkley, director of public Policy
for the Abundance Institute. Taylor joining us obviously to talk
about artificial intelligence and the impact or perhaps lack thereof
on election season, this critical election season. Obviously, as we
get closer and closer to election day, What about some
of the legislation before Congress? Again, the vast majority of it,
as I see, is really a reaction to the fears
that are driving around AI or being driven by people
afraid of AI. What sort of legislation are we seeing
in Congress today?
Speaker 2: So, I think there are a number of bills. I
think the leading contenders are on the Senate side, mostly
sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, and have gone through the
Senate Rules and Administration Committee, And my colleague Neil Chilson
actually testified and one of the hearings talking about I
think a package of four different Senate bills to prevent
the use of AI generated content or required disclosures of
AI generated content and elections, And you know, his testimony
and the others on the panel just just talked about
you know. So there's a lot a lot of these bills.
They I'll say, the federal bills and the state bills.
They start with definitions. That's if you look at legislation,
you'll notice that and that is one of the main
problems with this legislation, whether the federal level of the
state level, and all of it. You know, we can
say this about the Senate bills because that's what my
colleague talked about, and I totally with him. They define
artificial intelligence in such a way that it wraps up
all basically all computer software. So say one of these
Senate bills were passed as written and there wasn't a
narrowly defined definition of AI. And I'll just say here
for your listeners, defining AI is incredibly hard, especially in
a legal context. And as my colleague Neil noted in
his testimony before Center Rules Committee, the leading textbook artificial
Intelligence has a whole chapter devoted about the four ways
to define AI, and even that doesn't come to a conclusion.
So policymakers have a big job when they're trying to
do this. But anyway, you know, broad definitions that wrap
up all software. Again, back to the chilling free speech
we could see now. You know, most content is labeled
as AI generated when it's really not. Because say I
take a picture with my iPhone and make some tweaks,
you know, may say I'm a staffer for you, Matt,
and you're running for office, and I take a picture
of you giving a speech with my iPhone sixteen pro
and I just, you know, your face is a little dark,
so I'm just gonna hit the button brighten it. That
could count as AI and if that goes out into
the world, and that could have to be labeled even
though it's just a photo. So we can get these
real tricky areas of like where is that line between
AI generated and just you know what we would consider
quote a normal photo. And really there's no such thing,
you know, think about since the introduction of photography, you know,
editing photos pretty much happened at the very start, and
we've been dealing with an issue of manipulated media, you know,
throughout human history, frankly but certainly with all of the
history of photography. And there's no real reason to single
out generative AI as the problem or a problem here.
And so these federal bills that Klobuchar and others are supporting,
I think Josh Holly is a co sponsor of one
of them, requiring disclosures on political ads that use AI.
It's again, it's it's a problem in search of a problem.
You know, there's there's nothing showing that jenerative AI is
particularly harmful, and as they said earlier, I really want
to emphasize jenerit of AI can be a boon to
you know, political challengers, private companies, or individuals challenging the
status quo because they do a pretty good job, much
more cheaply than a team of graphic designers. And you know,
we could see some political power, some corporate power, whatever
the power might be challenged and right ways by individuals
institutions who are the kind of the upstart because they
have these these technologies available to them. That's why we
have very very careful with rules like this. You go ahead.
Speaker 1: Do you think that that's why there are politicians in
some in some degree fighting against this because it is
opening up the field of competition or it's balancing the
field of competition. You don't have the kind of resources
that a big campaign has, certainly an incumbent. You use
this sort of stuff, you start, you know, cutting cost,
you get your message out there a little bit more
than you would have otherwise. Do you think it is
a matter of the big guns trying to quiet competition.
Speaker 2: You know, everyone's motivations are different that could be the
case in some instances. You know, I describe you know,
best motivations is as often as I can. I am
seeing that on a lot of at least what these
politicians are saying. You know that there certainly could be
the case we should be very, very disappointing. But I
would say many of them are motivated by just the
I would say, the conversation. I'll just say that at
the elite's level. You know, it's not a very seldom
where the Atlantics, say, doesn't have an article talking about
the death of truth or the loss of free will
and bringing in AI generated deep fix as one of
the causes of that. So I think it's kind of
just the it's the diet of the media diet they're intaking,
They're they're reading smart people are saying this is going
to be the end of the world, and they apologies
and want to do something about it. And you know,
maybe a second order effect could be like, oh, well,
this could you know, help me as the incumbent versus
my challenger. That could certainly be a perk for some.
But you know, I'm hesitant to describe motives when I
learned not sure entirely positive.
Speaker 1: I certainly understand that defining back to defining AI. Is
it like the old court definition of pornography? You know,
I can't I can't define it, but I know what
when I see it? I mean that? Is that the
argument that we're seeing out there today.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, so we're still figuring it out, Matt.
And so we've been talking about generative AI and political
ad context, but you know, regulating our individual intelligence the
same problem as there absolutely, and legislation is often pulling
from federal spending bills like the NDAA from twenty twenty,
and people analyze that definition of AI. There's all sorts
of problems there. So we've yet to actually arrive at
like what I you know, at least in my opinion,
I think others would agree with me, a good generalized
artificial intelligence definition. I think the way to do it
is to to go narrow. And I think it's easier
to define generative artificial intelligence than just artificial intelligence because
many of the definitions I've read, even about AI would
just you know, they'd wrap up, you know, any like
an Excel spreadsheet, you know, a calculator, or a chess
you know, chess playing program when that's not the intent
of most of these bills. Like what most people and
politicians in particular say, politician policy makers are motivated into
action because of the release of chat GBT and twenty
twenty two, and it's you know, it's wild to think
it was, you know, not that long ago, but that
generative AI system is really spread into action. A lot
of this this energy around regulating AI, whether it be
in the political ad sense or generally, and there's a
long way to go. I think that's the story short
in finding a definition that works, because defining it too
broadly can wrap in way more software and technology than
was intended, and as mentioned earlier, for this little litigation
can result chilling of speech, costs to startups, you know,
the incumbent challengers to medium and large tech companies, and
that's not the world we want to see. We want
to see an innovation ecosystem where anyone can start a company,
can make money, can use these technologies for good and
more often than now, when federal government, state government's getting
involved and trying to you know, define and regulate, it's
it's going overbroad instead of narrowly targeted to what is
the harm They're actually trying to prevent prevent and going
from there and figuring out if you know policy of
old policy is the best solution or not.
Speaker 4: I'm interesting Justice and I'm the Western correspondent to the Federalists.
If you liked last month's book club episode is Myself
and Calm is a Scary when you reviewed Kamala harris
As twenty nineteen memoir The Truths We Hold to join
us on October first for our discussion reviewing former House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi's latest.
Speaker 2: Book, The Art of Power.
Speaker 4: Each month and I will be bringing down to the
latest books that are merged from the top of our
little class.
Speaker 2: So I'd like to invite you to read along with us.
Speaker 1: Well, let's face it, we've been dealing with artificial intelligence
for a very long time before correct concept of digital
artificial intelligence?
Speaker 2: Correct? What have you? I mean?
Speaker 1: You want to look about regulating and investigating a whole
accountable artificial intelligence. Talk to the Central Intelligence Agency. They
have been involved in artificial intelligence for a long time,
as have the FBI and others. But you know that's
that's the problem when we start getting into this deep
fakes have been happening for a long time, and sometimes
they're being done by our own government with our own
tech X dollars. So we need to think about that.
But let me ask the devil's advocate question here, what
what would be so difficult about placing on an AD
that this was that this AD was made with artificial
intelligence or artificial intelligence was a component in the production
of this ad.
Speaker 2: Great question, And you know, I'll say up front, you know,
so there's an assumption there that labels are that will
be effective at I don't know, you know, maybe informing people,
but then you know, is there a reason to inform
a person or not on you know, something is artificially
generated or not. And then there's assumption so it will
be effective. And research shows that, you know, labels are
actually not that you know, but they don't They don't
change people's opinion one way or the other that much.
Speaker 1: They're kind of look at morbid obesis this country, Taylor,
that should say, you know that all the labels that
were placed on all of the fast food value meals
in this country, nobody's a lot of folks aren't really
paying attention to those, and.
Speaker 2: It kind of becomes it becomes so noisy, right, like
seeing the calories and you know Domino's pizza menu or whatever, like,
it's just another number up there, and I just end
up ignoring it because I just want to know what's
the price, what's with the ingredients, and okay, there's a
bunch of other stuff. Yeah. So I think that's a
great point there, and you know, so your question, I
think the difficulty of it is, uh, it's it's that
line again of you know, what what counts as AI generated?
And some of these bills, you know, try to get
explicit about, you know, depicting fake like what a reasonable
person would you know, take to be fake fictional conduct
or behavior by a real person. But even even that definition, man,
gets real tricky and hairy fast, like what is what
do we mean like a reasonable reasonable person? This?
Speaker 1: Yeah, in this environment, who is a reasonable person anymore?
That's where the root of the definition problem comes in.
Speaker 2: I think, Yeah, what counts as you know, ridiculous content
or context content or you know, fake or you know,
could someone could view as fictional? So you have to
then there's the technical side. So say someone you know,
say I post something on on X that I've used
you know, generative AI to produce and it's maybe it's
pulling in like you know, I always use the Rhnda
Santis you know video from twenty twenty three. It's using
real footage interspersed with generated what took what appeared to
be generative AI images. So it's it's not like this
one hundred percent totally generated thing. Maybe that you know,
Kamala Harris parody video that was close to one hundred percent.
I believe generative AI, but you know, it's determining, so
you have that determination has to be made. And then
when does a label actually get applied? Is it, you know,
percent of the content is generated of AI? Does that
need a label or not? Like what actually helps people?
But then it gets to like the effectiveness of labels.
And I'll just a personal example. I wrote an op
ed and submitted it to a mainstream news outlet summarizing
you know AI news of twenty twenty three, and I
said at the top of the article, I used chat
GPT to help me write this, and it was denied
because I used a generative AI to write my article.
And I thought like it just kind of posed an
interesting question, like, oh, like if I hadn't disclosed but
they've been okay, And you know if I had disclosed,
like is there like a certain mixture that would have
been fine or not? And I think that's that's the
technical problem, determining you know, what amount of it was
was generated and the people are talking tools that say
they can prove, like, you know, this video was you know,
using facial recognition software. You know, there's some software that
purports to work because it can measure eyeblinks. So if
there's a video out there of me speaking human beings, blink,
I think more often than most AI models generating video,
but that's probably going to be a patch soon, so
that's not going to work forever. So it just gets very,
very difficult to accurately label quickly at scale. It's those
three components, Matt, that are the real tricky part. You
think of the volume of content, the data that individuals
across the globe are posting online every single day on
platforms large and small, you know who is actually doing
a label and how are they doing it? And then
is that actually going to meet the goal of helping
citizens and individuals discern you know, true and correct information,
And then that becomes its own issue of like what
is true and product information. The Hunter Biden laptop is
a great example of how how tricky that can be
and how the story can change over time is more
information is released and you know that's its own I'm
sure you guys have covered that well, as of many
other outlets, but that is I think kind of unpacking.
That's how it unpack and maybe answer that question, it's
it's not just a simple you know, hey, AI was
used here or not. It's you know, you have to
do it accurately, at scale and in a way that
actually helps helps people understand. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, you think about the events, the
major events over the last four plus years in this country.
The Hunter Biden story is a perfect example. You'll have
to forgive me and my fellow Americans, many of them,
when we get a little bit itchy, we get a
little bit concerned about government agencies created to be bureaus
of tracking disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. We've been down this
road before, so there is some clear concern about the
government stepping in to be the arbiter of what is
correct information, what is good information, and what is bad information.
Let's close with this. It's the what's next questions as
always because we're at a pivotal point in AI and
the election season. What is next on this front?
Speaker 2: As you see, well, my team and I at thebund
Ins Institute, we'll keep tracking all mentions of AI and
the US election and look forward to our report part
four in October, and then we'll have an actor action
after November fifth. And you know who, no one can
break the future accurately. But if if passed is any
sort of prologue, I don't believe that the doom and
gloom scenarios are likely to come true. I don't think
we'll see, you know, people not showing up at the
polls because of some generative AI, audio, video, photo, whatever
the case might be. But it's important to pay attention
in the list and I think, you know, that's why
I've appreciated this, this line of research, and I think
we'll see let's see, you know, the SCC proceeding is
happening right now. As I mentioned, we're going at the
first stage of this that agency promulgating rules on the
use of AI and political ads. Listeners should absolutely take
a look at what they're proposing. Deadline for comment is today,
so Congress is not likely to act because they just
have a couple of weeks left of getting stuff done
and they're wrapped up in funding battles and all that
sort of stuff. And the states, I think pay attention
in twenty twenty five. You know, when state legislative sessions
get back into gear, I believe more states will act.
And I you know, in many ways, you know, California
acting cannot inspire some states to act, but in other
ways that can. You know, some I think some legislators
look to California and say, hmm, we don't want to
be like California, so maybe we won't do that right.
And but I think then and nevertheless, you know, state
lawmakers are and governors are hearing from constituents there again,
and take this media diet of doom and gloom, and
I just want to say, like if I have you know,
a couple of suggestions solutions here is you know, there's
a stop panicking. This is not a story where the
prognostications have proved have proven true. If if anything, it's
just the old old style photoshop up.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: You know, bad actors putting in miss and disinformation into
the into the stream that are the cause of issues.
And even did I'll say the Department of Justice did
a report on you know, like Iranian Russian election interference,
and they said generative AI has not been a major
feature of what they've been doing. They're just sticking to
the old school playbook as far as we know. And
so the panic can create this false sense