Unraveling the complex knot of an AI-generated hoax
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What are the challenges of verifying AI-generated content?
It takes a lot to fool a tech reporter, but AI can get pretty close. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Earlier this month, a post went viral on Reddit, supposedly written by a whistleblower at a food delivery app. It alleged all kinds of sketchy behavior, like artificially slowing delivery times to push customers to upgrade. Reporter Casey Newton at Platformer decided to check it out. He started by asking the author to verify his identity and received a photo of an official looking employee badge.
Yeah. So he sent that over and said, I hope this suffices. His photo and name had been blacked out. But I thought, well, this is at least a starting point. I asked then if there was any document that he might have that would speak to his actual allegations. And while he complained that that might put him at additional risk, he said he would think about it. And about a day later, he messaged me again on Signal and said, I have something for you. And it was an 18-page document that is probably the craziest thing a source has ever shared with me.
Why was it so crazy?
Well, one was that as I read through it, it seemed to verify not just a handful of allegations, but essentially every single thing in the post. It was presented as a kind of research paper that had been done by a behavioral economics group inside the company, which he was saying that this was coming from Uber. And it said that, oh, yeah, you know, here's how we are calculating the desperation score. And here's what we're doing to, you know, slow down the deliveries for the customers that aren't paying. And, you know, in hindsight, it probably should have been a red flag that I was reading a description of almost cartoon villainy.
Yeah. So at what point did this really start to kind of break down for you?
Yeah, well, again, there was that moment of this is all seeming to be too good to be true. And I thought, well, let me see if I have any tools at my disposal that I can use. And so I know that a lot of the AI image generators embed these digital watermarks in the image that are designed to be useful in exactly cases like this. So I took the photo that he had sent me of his badge and I put it into ChatGPT and I said, does this raise any red flags for you? The answer I got was no. And then put it into Google Gemini, which came back and said, this image was generated in whole or part with Gemini. Gemini has what they call a synth ID, which is a watermark that's embedded in the image. And so all of a sudden, I had something that looked pretty much like a smoking gun that I was being hoaxed.
So it sounds like a lot really hinged on the fact that Google actually embeds this kind of, you know, watermark in its AI image outputs.
It did. And I do think it is just something that good actors in this space should be doing because we want to have all the tools we can at our disposal to help us sort through things like this.
How did Casey Newton investigate the AI hoax?
We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Casey Newton, reporter at the newsletter Platformer. Deception online is certainly nothing new, but what struck you about this experience?
Well, one reason why I was initially inclined to believe this source was that in the past, it would have taken a monumental effort to generate 18 pages and a fake employee badge, right? In fact, after I published my story, I heard from a reporter at NBC News who had also been messaging with the same source. And she shared her employee badge with me from NBC. And it was almost identical to the one that he had shared with me. So we now believe that he had just taken her employee badge, which she had sort of shared with him as a kind of good faith effort to build trust, fed that into Gemini and said, turn this into an Uber Eats badge. And within seconds, he had it. So it is just that easy. It did not used to be.
And I think we as reporters and people who are consuming the news need to kind of catch up.
Part of what stands out about this scenario is just kind of how low stakes it is.
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