Q+A: The technology helping prove what’s real in the AI era
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Sean Aylmer. It's one of the big questions of the AI era.
What is the main question of the AI era regarding video content?
How do you know if what you're watching is actually real? Generative AI is now producing images and video that can be almost impossible to distinguish from genuine footage, with few tools available to help. This week, Australian company Ion Video, I-O-N, Ion Video, announced a new patent it says could change that. Technology designed to verify whether video is genuinely human created by looking deeper inside the file itself. Finbar O'Hanlon is founder and chief innovation officer at Ion Video, a terrific supporter of this podcast. Finbar, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A.
Guys, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
I'll get to what you do in a moment because it's going to get a bit technical, but let's start very broadly. Can we trust what we watch on video at the moment?
Well, it's a great question. I guess it comes down to what does trust mean? So if it means can we know whether something is human-created or artificially created, well, yeah, there are mechanisms that can do that and there are technology companies. A lot of the big foundation models have technologies that will do verification over content. To what level their algorithms are currently at and where they currently go to is – is a matter for discussion, but essentially it's getting harder and harder to decipher what you're watching or what you're listening to, whether that is actually real or not. And, you know, as we probably all aware, deep fakes is pretty much a crisis, this ability to sort of pretend that you're someone that you're not.
Okay. So with that in mind, this new patent is about proving whether a video is genuinely human created in simple terms. And you are not talking to a genius, Finbar. Right. To me, explain how it works.
Okay. Well, first off, as you know, it can get super technical, but let's go back to the beginning of what this patent sits on top of. And it really comes down to the foundational that we're talking about video here, right? Not just audio, but it's primarily video, looking at digital video, digital representations in picture. Without getting super technical, the whole world up until this date has treated video as a file, something you click on and something that plays.
How does Ion Video's new technology verify video authenticity?
And we haven't really questioned the format of that video other than it's a video file and I click and play on it. And so the world has treated video as this rendered object whereby if you want to make a change to it, you go to a piece of software and you edit it and then you create a new file. The world has ended up with billions of files living everywhere that we then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to protect, secure, process, transcode. So we've treated the world of video as a file, okay? Now, what's inside that video, though, is something really unique. It's a database. It has a wrapper and it has every picture. Remember when you were a kid and you used to flip the corner of your book and you'd draw little stick figures and then as you would flip those pages, an animation would come to life?
Well, inside every digital video is a bit of binary or a little bit of technical information that says every one of those photographs that goes before your eyes to make it look like motion is actually represented as a digital bit. So inside a video file, if we looked at the internals, if we look at the A person on the outside, it looks like a person, but if we look through a microscope, we can see the internals and the cells and stuff. What lives inside video is basically little references, Lego blocks that relate to every single picture that happens a 50th of a second. And so once you know the internal structures of video, Then what it allows you to do, it allows you to treat video not as a file, but as a piece of data.
It allows you to reorganise the data to basically build you personalised video without going through all the processes that used to have to be involved.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–0:16
2
What is the main question of the AI era regarding video content?
0:16–2:37
3
How does Ion Video's new technology verify video authenticity?
2:37–6:24
4
Can we trust what we see in videos today?
6:24–10:29
5
What are the challenges of distinguishing real from fake videos?
10:29–11:03
6
How does the new patent change our understanding of video files?
11:03–12:40
Speakers
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