Laurie Segall
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Laurie Segall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah.
Yeah, the answer is, unfortunately, like any of us can, which is terrifying. That's like the reality of the world we're entering.
This would be like if you're a child and someone reaches out on Instagram and pretends to be your friend. And let's say you have a teenage boy. By the way, all this is going to seem really dark, so I just, sorry. Let's say you're a teenage boy. Pretty girl reaches out, starts trying to get them to send some kind of provocative image.
And the next thing you know, they say, if you don't pay me X amount of money, I'm going to send this to every single person you know. But your child never even took the image. Right. They were never even tricked into it. It's a deep fake of them. And it doesn't matter that it's not real because it looks real.
And these types of like sextortion campaigns are so horrific and children are ending their lives. And this isn't just children. I say this is happening to adults. This has been an ongoing thing for a while. So what's happening with the rise of artificial intelligence and deep fakes is basically the democratization of these types of scams. And none of us are safe.
So someone could say, I have a nude image of you, and I'm going to pass it around to everyone. And I always look at this from a victim standpoint. You can't just say, oh, it's just not me, because you'll see that image. It looks like you. And it looks like you. To an untrained eye, it's you. It could tarnish your reputation. People might not know it's real.
So these images aren't real, but the impact is real. So we always want to shout this from the mountaintops. This is what's coming. And we need tech companies to do a much better job. So let's talk about it. So somebody reached out to you. And then what happened? Apparently this is like a very common scam.
And I just happen to know a lot of good guy hackers from my days going to hacker conferences as a tech journalist. So I was able to afford this and be like, what is happening? But someone reached out and said, I have images of you. I've been able to hack into your device. If you don't give me X amount of money, implying they had intimate images of me, I will put this out there.
And what they do is I think they put some identifiable information about you, like your home address or something like that. You thought it was like you thought maybe somebody. For a second. And this is what happens. And I'm like a longtime tech journalist. Right. Like I am like, I got this. Like, I don't have to freak out. And even me, I was like, oh my God, do they have some, what do they have?
And you start questioning, your breath gets short. I literally had a security guy come onto my computer. I like had him remote into my computer and look for any malware. I wanted to be completely sure. And he was like, no, these scams are actually going around. So I posted about it. And the next thing you know, I get all these people messaging me privately being like, this is happening to me.
I was so scared. And one of the things they say, this is so, I love that we're really starting out strong on this. They'll be like, we saw you on a porn site or something and now we've remoted in. People are embarrassed to talk about it. So it's just like a wild, I would say like, it is a wild west right now. And there are so many of these different types of scams going around.
Like we are in the wild west of scams that are only made so much more believable by artificial intelligence, right? Like parents getting calls from what they believe are their children. because their voice has been imitated using artificial intelligence, because it takes 30 seconds of a voice sample to be able to mimic that voice.
This is, I think, the world we're entering at all these different levels where our identities are up for grabs and AI can just mimic our most intimate features, our face, our bodies, our voice. And so it's a bit of a wild west. And I think we have a long way to go with educating people on it.
Hilariously, we all need human passwords. This is literally what one of the top security guys said to me. I was like, how do people protect themselves? He's like, human passwords, safe words. I called my mom and I was like, if you get something like this from me, which it seems crazy to have to call our parents and say like,
If you hear an AI-generated voice or you're not sure if it's me, this is the word you need to say. This is our human password. In an interesting way, it's almost like our humanity is the thing that we're hoping will help us pull through in this weird time.
So this was all kind of a precursor to... We did a larger investigation that we've been working on. When I say, like... I get obsessed with topics. Like, this is for better and for worse. And I think three years ago, I became obsessed with this idea. Someone had mentioned to me there was this really shady site online, and it's a deepfake pornography site.
So literally, it looked like, and I mean, this is dark, but it's like you were watching sex tapes, essentially, of many women in the public, even though they never made them, even though they never would ever consent to something like this. But you were looking at hyper-realistic, deepfake pornography of, if you are even kind of a public figure, there's a chance you were on this site.
And I remember going to this, being like, Wait, this is insane. And then I started looking into it. At the peak of it, 18 million people were going to this site on a monthly basis. So I'm like, none of these women consented to having their image and likeness used. And like, you couldn't tell if it was real or fake, although like, we know it's not real, but that harm is very real.
And I just remember being like, why does this exist? Like, why are 18 million people allowed to go and see this? And these women have no control. And ironically, it was like a lot of women in power. So- Wasn't Taylor Swift? Yeah, Taylor Swift was on, there were so many people that were like, their likeness was taken and used on the site.
And this site, I became obsessed with it because I was like, okay, it's not just like about this shady site on the internet, but it was a platform, right? So it's not like people just went and saw these two horrific videos. They could also like create them or pay people to create them. And so like it became a whole platform and an ecosystem
Showing 1–20 of 89 · page 1 of 5
Next →