Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so
much for your support. Let's get into TikTok, shall we,
because all of the stuff. If you think TikTok is bad,
oh man, deep Seek Deep Seek is way worse, way,
way worse. So first let's explore TikTok a little bit
and all of the hullabaloo over the social media app
that one hundred and seventy million Americans use. That's like
half of us. That's crazy, one hundred and seventy million Americans. Now,
before I go into this, I think there are a
couple things that must be defined right up front. So
my card's on the table here. I'm not on TikTok.
Just for the record, I'm not on TikTok. I would
never be on TikTok. There's a reason why government, state,
local national have banned it on any of the government
laptops and phones and such. So the first thing, and
this goes to what I just said there is we
have to answer the first question, which is does the
Chinese Communist Party control it in some way or do
they benefit from it in some way? Okay, that's the
first question. And while the Chinese government being commies and all,
just because they don't technically quote unquote own it over
in that communist country, that is a distinction without a difference.
Because over in China they've got laws. I mean, yes,
they could change their laws whenever they want to, it's
the beauty of being a communist regime. But they have
a law over there that allows the government to take
whatever it wants from any business. So if the Chinese
Communist Party asks for something, and I say asks with
big fat air quotes around that, if they ask for something,
the businesses turn it over. Okay. So there is effectively
no real distinction or difference, I should say, between TikTok
and the Communist Party. It has an outward facing facade
of private ownership and investment, but the back end that
you don't see is what the Communist Party has access
to and or controls. And in my mind, again cards
on the table, I don't see any difference there. That
is a government controlled app because the company cannot do
anything if the government doesn't allow it to do so.
In economic terms, this is a fairly fascistic model. The
outward veneer of a free operating you know, business or
corporate entity, but behind the scenes everything is regulated and
run by the government. So does the Communist Party control it?
I submit? Yes, you may come to a different conclusion,
but I would submit you are incorrect, so, but that's
my opinion. Number two, is the Communist Party materially different
than a private US company? Right? Are? These are first
principles here in discussing the TikTok issue, you have to
address these. In my mind that the Communist Party running China,
I submit, is in fact materially different than private US
businesses that operate competing social media apps. Because while the
government in America may actually go and cajole or ask
request or pressure companies to do things, to my knowledge
up to now, the companies are not legally required to
upon penalty of like the murder of their CEOs with complying.
They're not legally required to comply with simple requests if
they're if companies or s. If the government wants stuff,
they have to still go to the companies, and the
companies still can reject those solicitations. Also that the government
isn't calling all of the shots. Again with the punishment
being death of your CEOs or imprisonment of your CEOs.
The government does not call the shots on the algorithms,
on the coding, on the data collection stuff, how it's used. Right,
the government isn't supposed to be scooping all that stuff up, right,
So to me, there is in fact, and again that's
a comparison between the US government and the Chinese communist government.
That's a different thing, which is actually the third question
is is the Communist Party materially different than the United
States government? Again, I submit yes. I submit yes. In practice,
they do often do a lot of things similarly, and
that is objectionable here in America. I oppose those things
when I learn of them. Most Americans object when their
government acts like the Communist Chinese Party in China. They're
not allowed to object. They if they are even aware
of what their government is doing. Right, So, those are
my biases going into this story. That I do believe
the Chinese Communist Party controls TikTok. I do believe that
the Communist Party is materially different than private US businesses.
And I do believe that the Communist Party in China
is materially different than the United State State's government. I
do there are different philosophies and ideologies and all of that.
So those are my biases. Okay, So one hundred and
seventy million Americans use TikTok. Over at the RAND Corporation.
They do a lot of defense contracting and stuff like that.
They do white papers analysis on you know, national international
military stuff, have for decades. And there's a guy over
there named Nate Levoy, and you can read this. It's
at rand dot org. The headline is TikTok is a
threat to national security, but not for the reason you think.
So what have we heard up to now about the
national security thread about TikTok. It's always framed where I
see it's, it's framed and usually dismissively, so as oh,
they're just going to collect your information for some future
that nobody knows, and that's all hypothetical. But that's not really,
that's not really the big deal. The discourse surrounding the
national security implications of the app overlooks a critical threat.
According to Lavoy, an unprecedented corpus or body of videos
ideal for training advanced deep fake generating AI systems. Okay,
all of the videos that you're posting up there can
be used to create the AI knowledge database with images, audio,
and then that AI can take all of your videos
and make you say whatever they want you to say.
This has been a concern of mine being in the
industry that I am in for probably about ten years,
that I have such a corpus, a body of work
that is available in audio format. Anybody can take my
audio and make me say whatever they want me to say,
and produce an audio clip that has me saying things
I've never said. All it takes I forget what the
exact number is. It's not a large number. It's like
fifteen or twenty or something like that. Vocal sounds and
with those fifteen or so twenty thirty sounds AI programs
and they've been able to do this for about a decade.
They can take those sounds and construct every word in
the English language the inflection in tone will be a
little bit off. But the more I feed it, the
more audio you give it, then the more it can
mimic me. The national implication threat here, should it right now?
Be obvious? Right? If you can make anybody say anything,
particularly if you've got audio recordings of them or videos,
then why couldn't you start spreading these deep fake videos
in audio? I don't know of clearance requests and information requests. Hey,
it's your boss, tell me this thing. What was that
meeting we just had? Which, by the way, they can
scrape off of your TikTok as well your location. It's
because when you click that little I agree to terms
of service on the TikTok app, you're giving it access
to like everything in your phone everything, and so that
all goes back to the Chinese. And for you, I'm
just watching cat videos. Yeah, that's fine for you. And
then what happens ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road road,
Maybe not you, but maybe somebody close to you, maybe
a spouse, maybe a kid, maybe a brother or sister
in law. Something They get a they get a job
in a sensitive field, and a sensitive field could be
really anything that the Chinese are interested in sabotaging or
learning more about or stealing stuff. Right, they get they
can access information about that other person through you and
your phone. They can construct timelines and calendars and stuff,
find out where this person was, where they were going,
and all this, all this stuff, they just keep scraping
and scraping and scraping. And then what do they do
with the information and the videos and the audios. They
feed them into their AI models, these learning models. And
that's what these That's what this deep fake thing or
what is it deep deep dive, what is it deep
deep speak, deep state, deep seek. That's what this thing
is doing. That's what the race is over right, They're
trying to get all of the information they can about
every single person on the entire planet. Oh and then,
by the way, they sell all of this technology to
authoritarian regimes to keep their populations in line. It's very
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The discourse surrounding the national security implications of the app
overlooks a critical threat training for AI systems. Right. These
AI systems are built by feeding information into them and
then it quote learns and all your TikTok videos are
being fed into Chinese controlled AI systems to learn about you,
to learn about you, and maybe to pretend to be
you if it has to, if they want to. Right.
For example, there's a story from early twenty twenty four,
a Hong Kong based employee at a British engineering company
transferred over twenty five million dollars to foreign accounts after
receiving oral authorization from his chief financial officer over the
course of a couple of routine zoom meetings. The CFO
was never on those zoom calls. This would have been
standard procedure, except that the CFO and all the other
employees on the calls were all impersonations created by scammers
using artificial intelligence. I found out about this story from
my financial advisor. It has the financial advising industry freaking out,
well some some people maybe others not so much. And
so anytime I want to do anything, I have to
if I call my financial advisor. He calls me back.
He doesn't believe it's me unless he can call me back.
Think about that. You're on a zoom call. You take
you know, hey, got an email. We're going to do
a zoom call. Got to do some money transfers like
we always do on Tuesdays. And you join the call
and there are a bunch of employees there. They all
look like your colleagues. You've seen them all before, You've
been in these zoom chats with them many many, many
many times, but none of them are actually there. They
sound the same, they look the same, they look like
they're talking, but it's not them. As AI systems rapidly scale,
these fabrications are increasingly hard to distinguish from real people.
There have been, you know, a couple of sort of
tells with AI stuff, Like one of the big ones
was six fingers. For some reason, AI generated images has
a problem with five fingers, and so it throws on
an extra finger so you can look at the fingers.
You can look at look for things that should be
straight lines like in the background, but may bend. Stuff
like that, eyes, ears, little things, little details like that,
like you now have to inspect all of these images
to make sure that it's not some AI generated image.
He says, it's this is Nate Lavoy at Rand Brand Corporation.
It's easy to imagine the national security implications of an
adversary artificially generating videos of Americans doing and saying anything
they please. How about this battlefield movements or atrocities. Mmm,
we have video of US marines doing some awful things
to poor innocent people. Right then? And then what do
you say, like, well, that's not me. I didn't say
that thing. I didn't do that thing. Prove it? How
can I prove I didn't do that? But also, the
propaganda value is limitless for an adversary, and that's the
thing that maybe I should have laid out. Also, I
view China as an adversary. I view them no differently
than I view the Soviet Union. That's how I view China.
You don't have to, but I do. We should not
be trading with them at all, because we did not
do trades with the Soviet Union, right. We did not
allow them to own companies here, we did not allow
them to invest here. They were our geopolitical foe. They
are an adversary, and we don't treat them like that.
I disagree with that, thanks a lot, Bill Clinton, But
like most favored nation status all of that. No, they
are playing a long game that we cannot even as
a body politic, as a citizenry like we can't even discuss.
That's what it seems like to me. We are not equipped,
We are not serious enough to discuss what China is doing.
They know what they're doing. They watched what happened with
the Soviet Union. They're not going to make the same
mistakes the Soviets made. All right, I hope you had
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got this message from Russ. He says, this AIDEP stuff
is why I make my wife provide three factor verification
anytime she asks me to do something around the house.
You can't be too carerifying that it's true. That's a
good that's a good plan. Dennis says. If you have
to figure out what is the juice derived from the
squeeze on TikTok, what does it provide that other apps don't?
It does that buru, it does that thing. I think
that's the difference. That's it. No, there's no difference. Now
they will say the secret sauce is in the algorithm,
and it's our algorithm that pushes all of the you know,
psychologically damn damaging stuff, I mean, the stuff you want
to see. But no shooting videos like remember vines. Remember
that that was the Twitter version of it, These little
six and seven second clips or whatever they were. They've
got it for Instagram, they got it on Facebook, they
got it for YouTube. They have all of these short
clip things too. Now there are people, and I do
feel bad for them that ignorantly built massive followings on
TikTok and do their little dance videos and lip sync
videos and tide pod ingestion videos whatever like they and
they've amassed millions of followers and they have created careers.
Basically they make money, a lot of money. Millions. Some
people on TikTok make millions and millions of dollars. I
mean it's no only fans, but just as damaging psychologically.
But the now, the TikTok creators, you know, these pioneers
that did all of this work. Yeah, like that's going
to be difficult to rebuild. I get it. Moving from
one platform to another is difficult. You're going to lose
people in that migration process. You will, but I will
tell you a secret of all content creation. Content is king.
If you make good content, people will find you. That
is why I toil in obscurity. That's and so that's
the key. And so if you just focus on making
whatever the content is that got you the success, you
will continue to enjoy success even if you lose some
of your fan base when they don't migrate over to
whatever platform. Isn't a national security threat and it's also
a personal threat to you. Right if you amass a
large following on TikTok? Do you think that the Chinese
government isn't going to use you? Do you think the
Commis are not going to use you and your images
and your audio to make you say things or may
shoot videos of you that you didn't do in order
to manipulate Americans. Like, that's the game the Chinese are playing.
The Communists do not like us. I don't know what
it takes to get this through people's thick skulls. Communists
do not like America. They don't like the American form
of government. They see us as their rival. This isn't
like a ooh, like, Oh, who's going to be the
first to do this? Oh, isn't that going to be
such an achievement. This is like the race to control
outer space, which by the way, the Chinese are trying
to do also so to curb foreign development of these
and other dangerous AI capabilities, the government controls exports of semiconductors,
which are the physical underpinning of AI. Equal emphasis, according
to this piece at Rand, equal emphasis should be placed
on cross border transfers of large data sets or bulk data,
because that's the fuel for generative AI systems. Right, AI
systems that can generate information, they rely on massive transfers
of data. This means re examining foreign controlled data aggregation platforms,
especially TikTok. The US government has raised several objections to
TikTok's data collection practices, mainly focused on American users sensitive
personal information. TikTok has responded to these concerns by creating
Project Texas Everybody Out Texas, an initiative to store protected
US user data like emails, birthdays, and behavioral data on
US based oracle servers. It's the company oracle safeguarding that
kind of data is really important, though, but equally significant
national security risks emerge from the flood of publicly posted
videos TikTok assures that quote US users of the TikTok
platform can still communicate and interact with global users for
a cohesive global experience. See that's the problem. The videos
that users are posting publicly are not subject to Project
Texas restrictions and can still end up on those foreign servers,
where they then get fed into the AI systems. Most
of the individual videos that Americans post on social media
platforms are harmless at face value, but every day there
are thirty four million videos posted onto TikTok and that
is used as training material for their AI systems. These
models will be able to create convincing deep fakes and
could be used to launch discrete, large scale and highly
targeted influence operations. This is not an abstract threat either.
This is not something oh that could happen in the future.
No policymakers have to understand. In the age of generative ID,
bulk audio visual data can be more valuable than the birthdays.
The email addresses all of that stuff that users have
to have and give over when they sign up for TikTok.
That's not even the information that they want anymore. Chinese
actors have already used generative AI to spread disinformation. They
use TikTok to spread anti American propaganda within our country.
TikTok releases monthly lists of uncovered covert influence operations on
the app, and they show that in May of twenty
twenty four, a network with hundreds of thousands of followers
operated from China targeted a US audience. The individuals behind
the network created inauthentic accounts, so fake accounts in order
to artificially amplify narratives that the US is corrupt and unsafe.
They are working to destabilize our society. Do you understand
what that means? TikTok users? Do you understand what that
means that a communist regime halfway around the planet is
using you and your videos and your TikTok accounts to
destabilize our entire society. I'm not saying the sky is falling.
I mean, I'm kind of saying that it already has.
But no, but the threat is real. This is not
something in the future. Why do you think TikTok tells
everybody post your videos vertical? Like? Make your videos vertical, like,
not horizontal. Make them vertical with a nine to sixteen
aspect ratio. They want uniformity. They want all of the
same stuff because they're communists, but also because they want
to be able to feed same data sets into their systems,
so it reads the same template all the time. It
doesn't have to worry about, you know, turning the video
and different aspect ratios, right, perfect training material for the
AI systems. Also the dynamic water marking, you know, the
little logos and such that TikTok adds to all uploaded
videos to make it difficult for other actors to scrape
those videos for AI training purposes. It means though, that
they get to keep using it and nobody else can, right,
So it's it's unique to them. It's their AI training material.
Nobody else gets to use it, all right. If you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
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media landscape more transparent doing the TikTok on TikTok and
the band by the way, I just for the record,
for the record, I will say I don't believe Donald
Trump made the right decision on the executive order to
save TikTok. I believe he caved to either a pressure
campaign by TikTok and its board, its president, the guy
that was at the inauguration, and the big donor jeff
yass who funded a lot of Trump's campaign expenses. I
don't know if he did it as a quid pro quo.
I'm not alleging that, but I think his reversal because
Donald Trump was the first one to start calling for
the TikTok band, and then it happened by law. Bipartisan
legislation was passed signed by Biden, and then the pressure
campaign ramps up. TikTok applies more pressure by taking their
site down the day before the deadline in order to
have all of these millennials and zoomers freak the bleep
out and they have nothing like if you spend seven
hours a day scrolling TikTok videos and it goes away
like you are a junkie looking for a fix. What
do you do with your time? Oh my god, I
can't do it anything. Ah, you know, I can't even
go cry on TikTok because it's down. And uh, I
believe he caved. Maybe he works out some deal. But
TikTok had months to do a divestiture. TikTok had months
and they refused, which was the tell that it is
not actually a company. It is an arm of the
Communist Party in China, because they would rather fold the
company and blow out all that shareholder value rather than
give up ownership of what it is they're using TikTok for.
That should tell you everything. They went to court, they
lost in court, they appealed, they lost again, and they
would prefer to not sell. They would prefer to shut
it down. Byte Dance is the parent company who also
has its own AI system. Yeah, they have their AI.
What do you think is feeding their AI ByteDance is
supposed to sell TikTok to an American buyer. Oh, actually,
like a week ago and they didn't. Failure to comply
would result in a fine of five grand per user,
totaling almost one trillion dollars. Mass collection of bulk training
data for deep fake systems is not currently part of
the dialogue, but it needs to be, and it needs
to be at the forefront. There are no laws banning
the sale of bulk audio visual data overseas. The issue
with TikTok, according to the rand folks, the issue is
with TikTok is not what is set on the app.
It is the pipeline of training data to countries of concern.
Even if China lost access to the body of TikTok data,
they could still potentially use American AI platforms for nefarious purposes.
Both Russia and China have already used chat gps to
generate malicious content. However, companies like open ai and Meta
are subject to American regulations. In July twenty twenty four,
Congress introduced a bill that would force domestic generative AI
companies to water mark their models AI generated content, So
you would be required to have something on there that
says this is AI. A water mark on the video,
you know, like one of those kind of faint images
or something, or logo. This would limit any adversary's ability
to effectively use American models for nefarious purposes, because the
generated outputs would be permanently marked as such and therefore
would be hard to pass off as reality. Chinese made models,
on the other hand, are not restricted by these rules.
The bulk data supplied by TikTok will streamline China's creation
of those tools. And that brings us to deep Seek,
which upended the marketplace yesterday. All of a sudden, everybody
became aware of deep Seek, and much like leftists flocking
to Blue Sky or that other Chinese app where they
were like, how dare you take away my TikTok I
want to give China all my information, and they went
over to some other Chinese app. Right Deep Seek is
doing the same stuff but worse, and it also did
up end the entire model. All right, that'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I
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thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone. M m hmm.