The Last Show with David Cooper
Carmi Levy: Dial 9-1-1 For AI (Non-emergency Edition) - January 22, 2026
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Are you thinking of creating deepfake videos of your favorite actor, Matthew McConaughey? Well, you might want to be careful because he's trademarked himself and he could sue you.
I'm here with Carmi Levy to talk about celebrities and deepfakes and other stories from the tech industry on It's Time for Technology Time. Carmi, welcome to the program.
Oh, good to be with you, David. Definitely my best time of the week.
When I think of celebs that people would want to deepfake, I think like Taylor Swift or like Brad Pitt. Matthew McConaughey doesn't come to mind, but he's trailblazing here. I think it annoys him that people are stealing his voice, stealing his likeness, creating videos, creating memes. And you know what? He's got every right to be annoyed.
He sure does.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of deepfake technology on celebrity rights?
I mean, look, people recreating their own Lincoln commercials in the Costco parking lot, probably not something he's really happy with. You know, all right, all right, all right. But like like he's got a point because AI video generators are making it ridiculously easy for anyone to create. a realistic looking video of pretty much anyone they wish. And you don't even have to know how it works.
You just type a prompt and poof, out comes the video. So he went to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and he submitted a bunch of likenesses of himself. So he's standing on a porch. He's smiling. He's having a conversation. And Of course, an audio clip. All right, all right, all right.
And so that way, if it's trademarked, then it's harder for someone else to use it to train AI, to use it to create AI generated assets. And it's kind of a new weapon in the war against protecting kind of who we are in this AI world. I think good on them. And I'm hoping more people do it.
What's really interesting to me is Matthew McConaughey is an investor in an app that can do voice cloning and AI voice creation. If you're ever on the phone with a customer service rep and they sound really real but you're pretty sure they're a robot, it might be this product. It's called Eleven Labs. It's kind of freaky if you try it, how good it is at creating voices or cloning voices.
How is the listener right now convinced they're not listening to me on 11 Labs? I don't know. I actually have tried it, Carmi. We were supposed to try it and create a fake interview. That never happened. Oh, no, we didn't. When you do it, people might think it sounds like you, but if you hear your own voice with it, it sounds odd. There's just something off about it.
The way you talk is like almost modeled perfectly, but not quite.
Yeah. And that's only because that's where the technology is now. But obviously, over time, it'll get better. And there's a lot of irony there, right? He's investing in this technology.
I want to make sure I didn't derail too much. He's an investor of these AI, you know, cloning products. And so that's kind of curious to me that he's on the one hand trying to prevent it from happening. But on the other hand, he's investing in the tech. There seems to be a contradiction there.
There is, but I guess maybe because of his involvement in the industry, he realizes the existential threat it poses to people whose careers are literally based on their likeness, based on their voice, what they look like, what they sound like, how they move. And that if that can be easily replicated digitally, then that puts their career under threat.
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Chapter 3: How is Matthew McConaughey addressing the issue of likeness theft?
Yeah, and the money, it is into the trillions. OpenAI alone, which is the company that invented ChatGPT, they've committed to spending $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next eight years. So things like data centers, the power grid to power them, the networks to connect them.
It's really expensive being an AI company, and if you're giving it away for free, and ChatGPT is largely free, they do have subscription tiers as well on top of it, but that's not enough to really make it a sustainable business. It loses huge amounts of money because it's so expensive to build all that capacity. At some point, you've got to monetize it.
You've got to convert all of those free 800 million users who are using it regularly into revenue. Google did it. Everyone else is doing it as well. Meta did it with Facebook and Instagram. And I would expect that the AI industry is going to do the same thing. And even though Sam Altman, the CEO, he always called them a last resort. He hated ads.
He called it uniquely unsettling to combine ads with AI. And yet here he is. I think even he recognizes if they want to grow, this is what they have to do. And they're going to have to insert them. The good news is, is they're promising anyway, that it's not going to affect how the chatbot works. In other words, the answers that you get aren't going to be influenced by the ads.
They'll be displayed separately, which sounds very similar to what Google said when it introduced ads a generation ago. And we all know what happened next. So, you know, basically ads are going to be competing against organic content generated by the chatbot. And at some point it's going to become even more difficult to tell the difference between the two.
imagine like, I don't know if this is true. I'm making it up, but imagine the best way to get rid of a headache was to go for a run. Okay. Like, I know that's not, I know that's not true, but imagine it was. And then I say, Hey, chat GPT, how can I get rid of my headache? And now it should tell me to run, but instead it says, try Tylenol and click this one button to integrate with Amazon.
We'll have it delivered into your door in 15 minutes or less. Like this, honestly, it feels like an episode of black mirror that dystopian sci-fi show. Uh, I don't like it, but, you know, I don't use chat GPT that often, so I guess it doesn't offend me. But this is the future of how people are going to query and search on the Internet.
It is. It is a very dystopian future. And quite frankly, it's a dystopian present because look at the Internet as it is now, and it's completely overrun with ads. I think we would have had to be spectacularly naive to assume that AI wouldn't do exactly the same thing. And because it's AI, those ads are going to be even more high fidelity, more targeted, more annoying.
I had this gentleman, he's sort of a tech guy, Cory Doctorow on my show, his book, In Poopification.
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Chapter 4: What is Eleven Labs and how does it relate to AI voice technology?
And we all seem to think we're getting such a great deal because we sign up for these services and they don't have to pay for them. But in reality, our data is being harvested to within six inches of our lives. And that is what fuels the economy. And that's why they continually try to keep us engaged. The longer we're on it, the more they can collect, the more money they make off of us.
Mr. Carmi Levy, a tech analyst, is here on It's Time for Technology Time. Imagine calling the cops because, I don't know, you have a dispute with your neighbor. It's somewhat urgent, but not an emergency. You call the non-emergency line. You would expect an operator to help you dispatch a cop to your house. And yet, the Toronto police are rolling out AI to handle these non-emergency calls.
My worry is it won't go that badly. And then emergency calls will use the tech, although maybe it will go badly. I'm here with Carmi Levy. What could go wrong? Carmi, welcome in.
Well, it's AI. What could possibly go wrong? No, and the potential is there, right? So you call into the cops, and instead of a human picking up for that non-emergency call, an AI picks it up, and maybe it asks the wrong question, or maybe it makes the wrong suggestion, and next thing you know, you're going down a rabbit hole. And so the potential is definitely there.
Also, sometimes people are kind of timid. They're like, I don't want to bother the cops. My husband's chest is really hurting him, but I don't know if it's a heart attack. It might be. Maybe I'll call the non-emergency line. You call and then the operator says, oh, no, no, this is an emergency. And they escalated to 911. I don't want that person to be AI. Yeah.
And I think that's the thing. I think the recognition, like if you call for, you know, somebody tagged my house or, you know, a complaint about someone driving in your neighborhood or, You know, a simple theft. Those are non-emergent calls.
And so if you call in and it's determined, according to the description from the TPS, that it is an emergency, they will escalate it to a human call taker and it will be treated as an emergency. So the AI is constantly looking for signs that, oh, you know, this really is a time sensitive issue. Let's get a human involved.
But do we want AI to hallucinate when that happens? No, we don't.
No, we don't. But it's kind of like replacing one sort of bad outcome with another, because in the current state, if you call the non-emergency line, you're probably going to be sitting on hold for, on average, they're saying the wait time was about six minutes and 11 seconds. So, you know, for a lot of people, that's a lot of time.
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