Adi Robertson

Did this person say this thing? Is this true? So I just I don't know that you could cut a deal with Joe Biden that says every time Joe Biden, you make something up about him, he gets a penny.

There are companies that are signing on to an initiative called C2PA, which is – we were talking about watermarks earlier. It's a content provenance system. It includes a watermark that has metadata, and the goal there is the idea that –

you will be able to at least tell where something has come from and whether it's manipulated, and that it's supposed to be this broad industry-wide, everybody has the same watermark system, so it's very easy to look at an image and pop it in and check and see if it has the watermark. That's one of the leading ways the AI industry at this point is trying to deal with truth and provenance.

Watermarks are rolling out places. OpenAI adopted them in mid-February. They're starting to appear on Dolly Images. You can look at them in Photoshop. I think the problem is more that this thing rolled out, but really most people are not going to care enough to check.

Yeah, a lot of the issue with C2PA right now is that you have to actually go in and pop it into a tool to check the metadata, which is just an extra step that the vast majority of people are not going to take. And that, yes, it's not applying to things like Sora yet, at least as far as OpenAI has told us. So there is not a really prominent in your face, this thing is AI in most cases.

I mean, a screenshot tool, as far as I can tell, can remove the watermarks. And I think there are ways that you can end up just stripping these things out. It's very, very hard to create a perfect watermarking system.

Just so much of this relies on a lot of Adobe's argument being, well, eventually we want people to expect this, that it's going to be like, you know, if you look in your browser and you get a certificate warning that says there's no certificate for this webpage, maybe you won't trust the webpage.

I think the goal they're going for is the idea that everyone will be trained into expecting a certain level of authenticity. And I just don't think we're at that point. In some ways, these problems already existed. Photoshopped nudes have been a thing that has been used to harass people for a very long time.

And Photoshopped images of politicians and manipulated content about politicians is nothing new. A thing AI definitely does is scale up those problems a huge amount and make us confront them in a way that it was maybe easier to ignore before, especially by adding a technology that

The people who are creating the technology are trying to hype up in a way that sounds terrifying and world-ending for other reasons. The problem with a lot of this is that you can't apply the kinds of paradigms that social media has because it really only takes one person with one paradigm.

capability to do a thing like it takes one bad actor to make something that you can spread in huge variations that are hard to recognize across huge numbers of platforms i think that raises slightly different problems than say there's this big account on social media that's spreading something well all right facebook can ban them

There are a lot of different problems that AI-generated images pose, and there are cases where individual states have passed rules for individual problems. There are a few states that incorporate, say, non-consensual AI pornography laws into anti-pornography.

general revenge non-consensual porn rules there are a few states with rules about how you have to disclose manipulated images for elections and there are some attempts in congress to create a larger framework or in the say fec and other government regulatory agencies to create a larger framework but we just are still in this large chaotic period of people debating things

The copyright issue is actually something that came up with non-synthetic, non-consensual pornography because, say, if one of your partners took a nude picture of you, you don't own that picture. And that was already just a huge loophole that... legislators have spent about a decade trying to make laws that meaningfully address nonconsensual pornography that's not AI-generated.

And the frameworks they've come up with are getting ported over to AI-generated imagery, that a lot of it is about, all right, this is harassment, this is obscenity, this is some other kind of speech restriction that is allowable. A lot of nonconsensual pornography is a kind of sexual harassment thing.

that we can find ways to wall outside protected speech, and that we can target it in a way where it's not going to necessarily take down huge amounts of other speech, the way that, say, just banning all AI-generated images would.

There's California, New York is another, there's Texas. At the federal level, there have been attempts to work this into, it's not a criminal statute, but there is a federal civil right to sue if you have non-synthetic, non-consensual point of view.

And there have been attempts to work AI into that and say, all right, well, it's not a crime, but it's a thing that you can sue for under, I believe it is the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. And then there have been attempts to, like you mentioned, just tie all of this into a big federal likeness law.

So likeness laws are a mostly state-level thing that says, all right, you can't take Taylor Swift and make her look like she's advertised your Instant Pot. And so there have been some attempts to make a federal version of that. But likeness laws are really tricky because they're so much broader that they end up catching things like parody and satire and commentary.

And they're just, I think, much riskier than trying to create really targeted, specific use laws.