Arvind Narayanan
speaker
255 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 25 Jan
Arvind Narayanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the use of AI to make non-consensual deep fakes, for instance, deep fake nudes, and this has affected, you know, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, primarily women around the world and governments are taking action now, finally. So that's a good thing.
I agree. So we call this the liar's dividend. People have been worried, for instance, about bots creating misinformation with AI and influence in elections and that sort of thing. We're very, very skeptical that that's going to be a real danger.
But you could have created those things without AI.
Yeah, I think that's fair. But I think the reason that might fool a lot of people is because it came from a legitimate media company. So I think the ability to do this, you know, emphasizes some of the things that have always been important, but have now become more important, like source credibility.
That actually is our prediction. People we predict are going to be forced to rely much more on getting their news from trusted sources.
So misinformation is a problem. In a way, I think misinformation is more of a symptom than a cause. Misinformation slots into and affirms people's existing beliefs as opposed to changing their beliefs. And I think the impact on AI here, again, has been tremendously exaggerated. Sure, you can create a Trump deepfake like you were talking about.
But when you look at the misinformation that's actually out there, it's things that are as crude as video game footage. Because again, it's telling people what they want to believe in a situation where they're not very skeptical.
For sure, yeah. But I want to push on, you know, is this really an AI problem? These are, you know, deep problems in our society. So creating an image, you know, that looks like there were a lot more people there than there were. Yeah, it's become easier to do that with AI today. But you could have paid someone $100 to do that with Photoshop, you know, even before AI. It's a problem we've had.
It's a problem we have been dealing with, often not very successfully. My worry is that if we treat this as a technology problem and try to intervene on the technology, we're going to miss what the real issues are and the hard things that we need to be doing to tackle those issues, which are, you know, which relate to issues of trust in society.
And to the extent it's a technology problem, it's more of a social media problem, really, than an AI problem, because the hard part of misinformation is not generating it, it's distributing it to people and persuading them. And social media is often the medium for that. And so I think there should be more responsibility placed on social media companies.
And my worry is that treating this as an AI problem is distracting from all of those more important interventions.
Yeah, I think the primary control is being exercised today by social media companies.
So when we were talking about deepfakes, I'm much less worried about misinformation deepfakes and more worried about deepfake nudes that I was talking about, right? So those are things that can destroy a person's life. It's been shocking to me how little attention this got from the press and from policymakers until it happened to Taylor Swift. a few months ago. And then it got a lot of attention.
So there were deep fake nudes of Taylor Swift posted on Twitter slash x. And after that, you know, policymakers started paying attention. But it has been happening for many years now, even before the latest wave of generative AI tools. So that's the type of misuse that is very clear.
And then there are other kinds of misuses that are not necessarily dangerous in the same way, but impose a lot of costs on society.
So when students are using AI to do their homework, for instance, now high school teachers and college teachers everywhere have to revamp how they're teaching in order to account for the fact that students are doing this and there is no way really to catch AI generated text or homework answers. And so these are costs upon society. I'm not saying that the availability of AI makes education worse.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. But it forces a lot of costs upon the education system. And ideally, AI companies should be bearing some of that cost.
Sure. So I don't think you're wrong. I think the reason there is a lot of talk about this is it goes back to something we've observed over and over, which is that when there are problems with an institution like the medical system, Right. Like the wait times are too long or it's too costly or in a lot of countries, you know, people don't even have access.
You know, in developing countries, there might be entire villages with no physician. Then this kind of technological bandaid becomes very appealing. So I think that's what's going on here. I think the responsible way to use in medicine is for it to be integrated into the medical system. And actually, the medical system has been a very enthusiastic adopter of technology, including AI.
So you can consider CAT scans, for instance, to be a form of AI to be able to reconstruct what's going on inside a person based on certain imaging. And now with generative AI as well, there's a lot of interest from the medical system in figuring out, can this be useful for diagnosis or for more mundane things like summarizing medical notes and so forth. So I think that work is really important.
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