AE 1390 - The Goss: The Internet is Drowning in Fake AI Video Slop

[Music] Get a U-Mob, Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English. The number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a GOS episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, and smith and we talk about the week's news, whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world. Okay, and we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the GOS. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practicing and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbling on a bit, I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird. And let's get into it. Dad, what's going on? Hey Pete, how do you know what's real? That's a deep question. It is a deep question. No, she don't. You don't. Well, and that appears to be the case. No, there was an article recently on the ABC about, well, the headline is, "Teenagers struggled to tell if videos are real or fake as AI floods social media." I don't think it's unique to Teenagers. I don't think it's Teenagers. I think the Teenagers, well, they were high school students that were asked. If they're finding it hard, I think the rest of us are. Well, exactly. Because they're the ones usually creating them. So yeah, so I mean, the story is, that's the story. We don't need to. There's no big problem. What is the experiment there? We showed four high school students. Wow, what a big pool of 21 short videos. Ten of them, real 11 AI generated. After each of the videos, we asked the students to decide if what they watched was real or AI. Before the test even started, the students were not exactly confident in their ability to spot a fake. So yeah, they found it difficult. It's one of those things I feel like I'm not too bad at it, but it really depends on the context. Usually, we're still at that stage where a lot of them are still very obvious, especially if there's a lot of movement or stuff going on. If you've got, I don't know, there's one video I've seen of the gorilla charging at the kids and smashing the glass. And part of it is, I know gorillas don't really just do that behaviorally. The other part is the amount of damage done to the glass, but a lot of them do look very convincing. A lot of the ones where you've got that sort of thing can look convincing. The ones that don't look terribly convincing to me, the ones which are like everything from sort of full body shot down to head shot of people, because they're very stylized. The number of random sort of attractive young women stuff that appears in, of just spam on social media. And you're scanned through it and you go fake, fake, fake. Because they all look the same. Part of me is surprising how many there are now being done by pages on Facebook. I try to think what is the monetary incentive here? Because people will just make fake photos and then have a story about like, and you don't get me. There was one that I saw that quickly on Facebook. I didn't give you anything. Yeah. There was one I saw today that was like lion had caused local extinction of mere cats. And it was very clear that the pile of dead mere cats was fake in the image. And so I'm like, and the story, what was the story? The lion had the task of an elephant stuck in its leg. And when a local vet removed it in order to reward the vet, you know, the lion went and killed all these mere cats. And I'm like, that's just a bullshit story. They just never happened. But there are so many levels to that. How would a task from an elephant get stuck in a lion's leg? And why would the lion just go and massacarandum mere cats and all? I don't know. But then the, they accompany it with a video or something and you're sort of like, who is this for? Is it just people wanting to be incredulous and like believe all this stuff and, or I understand people, obviously don't condone it. But I understand what the motivation is for people to create fake accounts of these things. Because usually they are trying to prep their audience for a scam. Or just massacarandum identity, right? Yeah. But often it's prepping people for a scam. It's like how many celebrity, fake celebrity things pop up all the time. Why? And I'm Chris Hemsworth. Yeah. I want it. I'm following you. Chris Hemsworth never following me on social media. Let's see your video and let you know. I know. And you're sitting there. Hey Ian. Really? But I understand why people are doing that. Because the next thing that comes from them will be a poster broadcast of the 10,000 people who've friend of them that says, hey I'm raising money for blah, blah, blah. What do you, you know, send it to this bank account? Is this something that sort of freaking you out though? Like as much as it is kind of still, you see a lot of these videos and you're like, this is just slop. Like and I'm not going to be fooled, you know, blah, blah, blah. Does it get to the point where you're starting to like be like in a year, where is this technology going to be? In 10 years, where is it going to be? Yeah. The technology doesn't particularly worry me. What worries me is that fortunately most people are cynical. And so that means that the people who are not are much more likely to be scammed by things. But also we will just not trust anything. That's what I keep. The people who are cynical are going, I don't trust anything. Yeah, anytime on Facebook, Instagram now and I see those sorts of stories about it. I immediately Google it. Yeah exactly. This never happened. This never happened. This never happened. And a lot of them are fake advertising for things. Like they'll use the, you know, such and such from morning television recommends you do blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go, they never did. But it's, they've AI'd up, you know, somebody looking like there and they never actually have them talking directly about it. But they'll mock it up. It looks like this was a news story from some time that you just missed on the channel whatever news. Yeah. You think it means though for things like, what would you say trials in the future are evidence because I imagine now with AI's like, church, epitene everything. It could probably just, you could manufacture video files that one have the video showing something that didn't really happen and how that could impact, you know, but also, for case, but it could manufacture the data to pretend like it was authentic, right? Yeah. And it could make this file appear as if it was filmed in this location at this time, you know, and so that it can appear like evidence for this thing that didn't happen or didn't happen, right? You know, so I wonder how much that'll impact things too where if you, previously if you had court cases, people could bring video evidence and be like, here's this person doing this thing. And based on the metadata of this file or the reverse, here's this person not carving in another state at that time. And if you can manufacture a picture of me in a bar, in Outback News South Wales, date stamped a particular thing. Yeah. It's like what happens when this technology effectively makes something like video evidence mute and useless and pointless, you know, it's a weird, it's weird that they could suddenly take away a big part of what is used in criminal cases or what have been accepted as or news where you, you know, you would, you trust your eyes, but in the near future, you will probably be so. And not, and not, and a lot of it too is, and this is, you know, one of my big bug bears about people believing stories without evidence and that the old gag about, you know, anecdotes are not data. Is it the plural of anecdotes and data? Yeah. And let's just studying anecdotes. Yes. Exactly. But, you know, that we're, and even, but then if the anecdote is fake, that makes it twice as bad. But, you know, people were, oh, but, you know, my mother's, you know, friend's uncle said this, you know, all it must be true. And I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe. It was a future, I'm a quote. Yeah. It's going to be an interesting world. I keep thinking about just the impact that this technology is going to have on jobs, on critical thinking logic, all of these things for our kids in particular. Because I'm coming to realize more and more and more my generation is the last one to have kind of lived prior to the internet and then to have passed through that period of all of this technology kind of, you know, being released to the public, the internet, computers, smartphones, all these things and getting used to it. Yeah. You wonder if kids at these days are going to be, if they'll have that same skeptical nature or, you know, logic. Well, hopefully, hopefully this actually increases it. The critical thinking part is going to be the challenge. And, you know, I've always, I'm going to know, used to be a high school teacher and I always use a say to kids when they come up with story. Oh, look, this was in the news. Why would you believe this? Just because it's being reported on the news, whether it be in the news, you know, the TV media, radio, newspaper or whatever, what's the actual evidence? What's the reliability of the source that you're getting it from and the source that they are getting it from? What's the motivation for this? And the motivation with news media now is clicks. It's advertising. The motivation for old-fashioned news media used to be keep you watching the Half Hour Television show or buy the newspaper because the advertising is paying for that to be done. With online media these days, it's just click through, click through, click through. If I'm looking at this for two minutes and scrolling through, the advertisers know that I've been on there for two minutes and they will pay more to that news source. A sad thing to have on there. It's incentivizing poor quality sensationalist AI slot news, do you? So you'll really quite often be like, this is just such, it's just trash that's been, it's been designed to rage bait me into checking it out. Exactly. And then it turns, it's so often now to my habit is getting on Facebook or Reddit or whatever and the link will say a certain thing and go to a news story and then I'll go to the first comment and be like, because it's always, I'll save you the click. Here's what the story actually is. And yeah, that's enough for me. And that's the point is the headlines now are all rage bait or click bait. They're all seducing you to go to the thing because as soon as you click on it, then the advertisers are more likely to pay money to that thing. Well, this is the biggest hate that I have for my job is that I have this constant battle with YouTube or with podcasts between creating sensationalist clickbait titles that are designed to get as many people to click as possible and reflecting the reality of whatever the content is. And you have to draw obviously it's a spectrum between complete rage bait, clickbait, shit that is not true, but we'll get, you know, Princess Diana is still alive. Yeah, exactly. Obviously it's. Whatever it is, you know, complete bullshit. And then the video is nothing about that to having a very, very boring and bland, literal title for the video that everyone's going to look at and be like, I know why would I click this. It's hard finding that balance of like you have to clickbait enough that people generate that curiosity to want to check it out, but not so much that when they watch it, they feel like you didn't deliver. Oh, they watched the first 15 seconds and go, yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, that's the tough, the tough thing in this landscape of online media content is trying to get some near and hold them and be ethical about it. Yeah. That's the hardest part. Yeah. And it can be a race to the bottom, which I think has happened for a lot of media companies because they rely solely on generating ad revenue now. It's like, we just need as many people clicking on and seeing the ad for this amount of time to get paid for it. And they don't, it doesn't matter if they stay on it. It doesn't matter how accurate the stuff is. And the irony is that the alternative to that is a subscription service to news, which are the Murdoch media in Australia, you cannot read news articles on Murdoch media without subscribing. And you go, all right, well, that theoretically means that they're relying on the quality of their stories for you to stay subscribed. But every single story you see is clickbait. And you go, really? I would I pay to watch this rubbish and I'll read this. Do you think it'll get to a point where, like as you were saying, maybe it'll do the opposite of what I was worried about and kids will just become skeptical of everything. Super skeptical. But I guess it can become, it's sort of almost a nihilist side of it where at some point everyone's like, well, what can nothing, it's all nothing is real. Nothing is real. I guess it's that post-modern sort of thing. Why even try? Which is interesting because I guess that's kind of like what happens in some foreign countries where the government controls the media. You just accept whatever you're given or not accepted because I think you know about it. And often they will intentionally put out their both sides of the story or both extremes in order to just exhaust the public so that they just tap out and say, well, I'm not going to bother, I'm not even going to bother trying to work out what's true and what's not. So I find it interesting thinking about that, like our kids are going to get to the point where they become super skeptical and logical and constantly evidence based and like, I want to get to the bottom of it. Or do they go the other way where they're just like, I don't give a fuck and it's too hard. Yeah, you just be like, well, I'll hopefully, hopefully you did. And look, I think the answer from an adult grandparent now point of view is encouraging. I mean, here's a ton of say teaching, but encouraging kids to be critical and curious and want to get to work out and go, well, and I said it's evidence and motivation. Whatever it is that they're providing, what's the source is how reliable are they and what's the motivation for them. And if you start to read and examine everything that you see and are experiencing that way, and even to the point of when people are telling you things, they go, well, what makes you think that's true? I know. And so often I'll be sharing posts and then before I click share, I'll be like, is this just something that confirms my bias? Yeah. Or is it bullshit and I need to actually make sure through other sources, this is true, because so often you'll read something and be like, oh yeah, that has to be true. I want that to be true. That agrees with what I think. And then you're like, is it like the lazy thing to do would just be to take it on face value and share it? And now, partly too, I'll just be like, well, I can't be fuck getting into it, so I'll just not share it. Or I'll just share it and have people tell me I'm an idiot. Yeah, that's it. And then just apologize. Oh, I didn't mean that. That's it. Alright, cool. So there you go. Yeah, it's probably only going to get worse. The interesting thing too is thinking about as a final question. Do you think that individuals have a right to their appearance and that there should be laws that prevent AI being able to use other people's likenesses, I guess, in videos? Do you think that will come through? Is that just a matter of time for those laws? Well, the only is that there are laws in many countries, Australia, US, UK, don't know about many European countries. I suspect they're the same. There are laws about that. But in person, yeah, people. No, but ignoring the AI thing, like my image, you cannot use my face for commercial purposes without my permission. You can't use my voice without my permission. Now is an AI generated image of me or an AI generated voice of me reading or telling you something? Is that me? And that's where that'll be tested in court. And it won't be long before some celebrity goes, that's not me. They represent me. It'll be some big company we'll decide to use in our video of someone famous. And I'll use the Chris Hemsworth thing before. And Chris Hemsworth's just going to go, I can put tens of millions of dollars behind the legal thing to just do the hundreds of millions. You're screwed. Yeah, exactly. It'll be interesting to see when and if that happens. It will be somebody, Taylor Swift. What the rest of you don't have the money to do that? Exactly. Taylor Swift is a good example of somebody who ended up, she took somebody to court for sexual harassment in a job when she was very young. And they counter sued her for defamation. And she won a dollar. She didn't actually want the money. She didn't want the money. She just wanted to make the point that you're going to spend a lot of money going after me to defend yourself for doing something that was wrong. And I think that's going to be one of the, and that's going to be the precedent that sets these things apart where you cannot artificially generate what appears to be somebody's voice or image. For a financial game. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting that the apps like Sora and these other ones that generate these videos at the moment can just use intellectual property of other companies and people. You'd be called asleep. I think that initially when they probably did it intentionally, when they released it, you could make videos of all these Nintendo games and characters and other things. And then all of a sudden Nintendo was like, "Ah, excuse me." And they disabled, they built it and did all with Pokemon or something. And they were sort of like, "Okay, so you can do it for that." There's all these other areas that you're not doing. And it's like, "Yeah, it's just going to have to be whether or not you have the money to follow it up, right?" Yeah. Anyway, yeah, where fucked? See you guys. Loosely. Bye. [MUSIC]