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Chapter 1: What deepfake video did Taoiseach Micheal Martin address?
But first, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin posted online last night calling out a deepfake video purporting to show him plugging an investment product. Here is the video along with the Taoiseach's response. See if you can hear the difference.
I've proven that anyone can earn 40,000 euros at any age with just a phone and 250 euros. This evening, you'll see your first 1,000 euro profit in your account or I'll personally refund you 10,000 euros.
So this is clearly very false material pertaining to myself, illustrative of the kind of manipulation and distortion that can take place on social media and a reminder to us all to be vigilant on social media and to take care and for the platforms also to make sure that such material never gets online and that it's taken offline as soon as it's identified.
That's the real Michal Martin there. And earlier you heard the deep fake. They didn't quite get the accent right, did they? But there's more and more of this AI content. It's being spread online. So will we ever get a handle on it? Will we always be vulnerable and just have to be cautious? I'm joined by psychologist and cognitive scientist, Dr. John Francis Leader.
You're welcome to the show, John.
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Chapter 2: How can we identify deepfake content effectively?
Hi, Clare. I hope you're well.
Thank you for being with us. Now, is it sensible for the Taoiseach to push back in the way that he did and to highlight this video and warn people about it?
It is, and really what we need is to develop a set of tools that I suppose happen on a few different levels. One is providers themselves that are having appropriate systems, but also the regulatory systems because it may not happen just to the goodness of people's hearts.
But the other thing I think that's really important is the Council of Europe just three weeks ago had an initiative on digital citizenship education. And this is this idea really of empowering people to not just be users of technology, but to be able to mindfully and critically engage with it.
So I think actually having this kind of conversation, it's part of that, but we need to follow it up with even more tangible ways of really developing the skills to determine what are we perceiving and is it real?
I mean, that deepfake video, which I saw this morning, it was OK. I mean, it wasn't great. You probably wouldn't be fooled into thinking it was Micheál Martin. But are we getting to that point where the AI systems are being perfected and in time it will be really difficult to tell the difference?
They absolutely are. And there's sort of two problems.
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Chapter 3: What tools are needed to combat deepfake misinformation?
One is believing information that isn't true. But the reverse also happens because you play just before that segment in your previous segment, you played another clip of me on Martin. And even though I'm a specialist in this area, I found myself saying, now, is that one real? You know, and that question is good.
You know, we want to be asking yourself that question, but we got to be careful with that as well, because we could end up not believing factual information sometimes in times that it matters.
And you do this with your students, don't you? You ask them to try and figure out what's real and what's not.
Yeah, it's part of what we do, and part of what we're trying to encourage more and more is, rather than not talk about this, or rather than theoretically talk about it, is literally bring in content and say, is this real? Is this not real? Now, sometimes it's going to be specific things you can spot. So, Neil Martin's accent was a definite tell for anybody who knows him for that last segment.
But sometimes it's a bit more subtle than that. It's a little bit like if you're buying an antique. You know, is this something real and authentic that's been around a while or did somebody just make it yesterday? So it's almost developing that skill set to be able to determine it.
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Chapter 4: How is digital citizenship education relevant to deepfakes?
And part of the thing that I think that we're really missing is if you had your snake oil salesperson, you know, 100 years ago come into the town square. You may or may not believe them, but at least some of your neighbour will come up and say, hold on a minute, I'm not sure about that.
So we're finding that a lot of the consumption of information is happening alone or it's happening in more isolated ways. So this community support mechanism isn't quite there in the way it maybe has been in the past.
The other thing is that we're consuming so much that it is difficult to be vigilant when you're consuming at speed.
It absolutely is. And that's why it has to be partially the systems themselves. We don't want to just put this on the users, but nor do we want to, as consumers of information, just trust them either. So there's quite a bit happening in Europe. We've got the AI Act. We've got the Digital Services Act.
We have legislation that's setting a bit of a base, but there's still a lot of work to be done to really fill in the gaps.
And really what we need to be doing is developing this idea of a healthy ecosystem, not just waiting for it to hopefully happen, but actually working backwards saying if we had a healthy ecosystem around the creation, the labeling, the verification of content, what does that look like? And then providers can implement and be nudged to implement tools for that.
But also users as well can be empowered to know how do you navigate those systems?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do we face in verifying online content?
How can you ask the right questions?
I remember in the past being a victim, I suppose, of these scams and that my image was used to sell cosmetic products. It was also there was also an investment one where people were being asked to click on an image. And the inference was that I died. That was a couple of years ago. Now, I was told it's very difficult to take these things down. You have to go through a lengthy process.
And my question is always, well, there's a platform out there that took money from some entity or person to run this because they're ads. So there has to be a readily available trail back to the person who is putting this stuff up. But then when you go to find out where that trail leads to, you're told, oh, no, that's that's very hard to figure out. It surely isn't that difficult.
Yeah.
Absolutely right. And there's a whole question here about intellectual property, owning our data, and just actually having access to some of these systems. Now, it's interesting because technology may come to our aid here.
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Chapter 6: How can blockchain technology help with content verification?
New systems, blockchain technology, verification systems potentially can implement the kind of things that we want here. Maybe not perfectly, but at least a huge improvement. But I hear you, and as a psychologist, I work with a lot of people individually affected by this. You know, it's not just a sort of a policy thing. It's a real experience, as you say, for so many people.
And it affects people in so many different ways. One of the things the European Federation of Psychologists Associations that does a lot of advocacy around this on a European level is really pushing for is that
ownership and access to one's own data, the ability to kind of see where it's going and what's happening, and then very quickly to be able to engage if it's going in the wrong direction, rather than we either don't know about it or we engage and we get the runaround.
Graham Norton now has has pushed this into the courts. He's won a court order against Facebook, an anonymous account to try and find out who is behind it. And they're using his image and his purported words to sell as well. Is that significant? Do you think that he has now won that court order?
Yeah, it's a step in the right direction and some of these rulings can have practical implications financially. There's a number of other legal cases in European Commission actions that are happening in this direction.
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Chapter 7: What legal actions are being taken against deepfake misuse?
So I think that they all build up a certain amount of momentum. But I think it's a tipping point a lot of the time for big tech because, as you say, there's profit to be made from sharing content. Truth isn't really the main metric. It's whether people click on us, and that really is an issue.
So I think a big part of what we need to be doing is, again, working backwards and designing what does this healthy system look like. The analogy I always like to use is food safety. We all consume food. We consume media. We consume online content. So how do we have systems where there are checks and balances and safety and proper reporting mechanisms?
Because really the content that we consume nourishes us, for better or for worse, just like the food we consume. So it has to be something that involves joined up thinking like that.
John, thank you for your time. Dr. John Francis Leder there, psychologist and cognitive scientist.
The Clare Byrne Show. With Aviva Insurance. Weekday mornings at 9. On Newstalk. Conversation that counts.
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