Adi Robertson

We've had, I think, about three major in the U.S. presidential election cycles where disinformation was a huge issue. 2016, where there was a lot of discussion in the aftermath about, all right, was there foreign meddling in the election? Were people being influenced by these coordinated campaigns?

There was 2020 where deepfakes technically did exist, but generative AI tools were just not as sophisticated. They were not as easy to use. They were not nearly as prevalent. And so there was a huge conversation about what role do social platforms play in preventing general manipulated information. And there was, in a lot of ways, a huge crack down, there was the entire issue of Stop the Steal.

There are these large movements that are trying to just lie about who won the election. What do we do? There were questions about, all right, do we kick Trump off social networks? These were the locus of debate. And now it's 2024, and we have in some ways I think a little bit of a hangover from 2020 where platforms are really tired of policing this.

And so they're dealing with, all right, how do we renegotiate this for the 2024 election? And then you have this whole other layer of generative AI imagery, whether or not you want to technically call it deepfakes is like an open question. And then there are all the layers of how that gets disseminated and whether that turbo charges a bunch of issues that already existed.

Yeah, I think that the oversight board, what it tends to do is that is maybe comparable to the Supreme Court is do sophisticated outside thinking about what does a consistent moderation framework look like. But like the Supreme Court in real life does not adjudicate every single complaint that you have. You have a whole bunch of other courts. Facebook doesn't have really those other courts.

Facebook has a gigantic army of moderators who don't always necessarily even see its policies. So, yeah, it's this very macro level. We're going to do the big thinking. But also, even at the time, there was the question of, is this really just Facebook or now Meta kind of outsourcing and kicking the can out of its court and putting the hard questions on other people?

Yeah. And part of this is also political, that there was a huge, largely, again, in the U.S., right-wing backlash to this, that this was the kind of thing that would get a state attorney general mad at you and get a congressional committee to investigate you. as it ended up doing with pre-Musk Twitter. I think that, yeah, there became a real political price for doing this as well.

Since then, some platforms have let Donald Trump back on. They've said, all right, but we cannot possibly moderate every single lie on this. We're going to just wash our hands of whether you're saying the election was stolen or not.

The companies are in slightly different spots, but they actually have come together. Very recently, they've signed an accord that says, look, we're going to take this seriously. They've announced policies that are varying levels of strictness, but tend toward, you If you're a major AI company, you're going to try to prevent people from creating information that maybe looks bad for public figures.

Maybe you ban producing images of recognizable figures altogether or you try to. And you have something in your terms of service that says if you're using this for political causes or if you're creating deceptive content, then we can kick you off.

We don't know necessarily how good the enforcement of it is going to be, but the companies seem so far pretty open to the idea of self-regulation, in part because I think this isn't just a civic-minded political thing. Dealing with unflattering stuff about real people is just a minefield they don't want. That said, there are also just there are open source tools.

Stability AI is pretty close to open source. It's pretty easy to go in and make a thing that builds on it that maybe strips away the safeguards you get in its public version. So it's just not quite equivalent to the way that, say, social platforms are able to completely control what's on their platforms.

Does stopping mean that you're just trying to limit the spread to where this doesn't become a huge viral thing that a bunch of people see, but it still may be technically possible to create this? Or do you want to say, all right, we have a zero tolerance policy. If anything is created with any tool anywhere, even if someone keeps it to themselves, that is unconscionable.

The most promising argument I've heard for these is the idea that you can – and this is an argument that Adobe has made to me – train people to expect a watermark. And so if what you're saying is we want to make it impossible to make these images without a watermark, I think that raises the same problems that we just talked about, which if anyone can make –

tweaked version of an open source tool, they can just say, don't put a watermark in. But I think that you could potentially get into a situation where you require a watermark. And if something doesn't have a watermark, there are ways that its design or its spread or people trusting it are severely hobbled. That's maybe the best argument for it, I've heard.

It does seem like the thing about a lot of generative AI tools is that there are just vast, vast numbers of ways to get them to do something. People are going to find those. Software bugs are a thing that has been a problem. Zero-day exploits have been a problem on computers for a very long time. And this feels like it kind of falls into that category.

So far, it feels like the consensus is we're going to label this and that's going to be mainly our job is that we're going to try to make sure we catch it. There are cases where, say, maybe you get it taken down if you haven't disclosed if you're a company or you're buying a political ad.

But broadly, the idea seems to be we want to give people information and tell them that this is manipulated and then they can make their own call.

I feel like the incentives for something like the music industry and for things that are basically aesthetic deep fakes, I think the incentives there are very different than they are for political manipulated imagery. That a lot of the question with YouTube is, okay, you are basically parodying someone in a way that may or may not legally be considered parody.

And we can make a deal where that person really, all they want is to get paid, right? And maybe they want something sufficiently controversial taken down. But if you give them some money, they'll be happy. That's just not really the issue at hand with political generated images. The problem there is around reputation. It's around people who do, at least in theory, care about.