Elon’s “Nudify” Mess: How X Supercharged Deepfakes

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24:20Kara Swisher:So Casey, when it comes to a lot of images, we're actually in a legal gray area in the U.S. at The Take It Down Act makes it illegal to publish non-consensual intimate visual depictions, both authentic and deep fake, but it doesn't take into effect until later this year. More importantly, what qualifies as an intimate visual depiction isn't clear cut. The Senate just passed, as you said, the Defiance Act for the second time, which allows victims of non-consensual explicit AI images to sue. But you run into the same issues you do with the Take It Down Act. It's not clear if the AI platforms themselves are liable.

24:52Kara Swisher:realistically. Talk about the legal recourse of victims of Grok's deepfake binge have right now. Well, I mean, it's terrible because it places the onus on the victim to go out and get justice for themselves, right? Like they have already been attacked in public and, you know, suffered in who knows what way. And now starting in May, there will at least be some avenue through the Take sort of justice done. But my fear here is that this is going to be yet another horrible customer service experience from a tech platform where you go onto a website and there's a form that you fill out and you send it in and you just pray that someone answers it, right?

25:37So I actually right now do not have a lot of confidence that this is going to feel like it is getting justice for any of the victims. And if you think about the sorts of people that are often targeted in these attacks, It is often women. It is often women who are, you know, politicians or leaders of some other type. And these sorts of attacks are used in an effort to silence them and to sort of drive them out of public life.

26:00Kara Swisher:Speaking of which, Ashley St. Clair, the former conservative influencer and mother of a child with Elon, has sued X over these deep fakes of her, and it's countersued saying she violated the terms of use by actually suing for her abuse. Yeah, well, in particular, because she didn't file in the Northern District of Texas, you know, which is just a frivolous, you know, legal action designed to make this, you know, more expensive and horrible for her. But my point is here, by the time that it comes to go fill out the form on the website that says, hi, like, I've been a victim of a horrible attack, the damage has really already been done here, right?

26:33And my fear is that this is just going to drive a lot of women in particular off of social platforms, which, of course, serves the interests of the fascists who run X.com. Okay. Can I add one more thing, too, is that the Take It Down has a 48-hour window. That's an eternity on the internet. The half-life of a social media post is about 90 seconds. The 48-hour window is completely absurd. The content has been online. It's been online for two days, and it's spread wildly. There's no taking it down at this point. So the whole thing, I think, is a fool's errand.

27:03Kara Swisher:So now Google, as you mentioned, Renee, Apple and Google could have kicked X off their app stores for violating their guidelines so far. Tim Cook and Satya Nudela have done nothing. They've said nothing. Renee, you wrote on threads that the app stores wouldn't do anything. Let's have you read what you posted. Okay, here we go. It's too big to regulate. It's not a two-bit nudify app, and Elon will howl censorship about second-order consequences. He uses the word even when Europeans fine him over blue check fraud. Similarly, congressmen that talk a big game about protecting kids with Zuckerberg are afraid of Elon.

27:32Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn should be speaking up. Talk about why they aren't and why they're upset about Elon in particular. So as we were talking about a little bit earlier, with the small 2-bit Nudify apps, there is one use for those apps. We all know what they are for. They are for harassment. And they are often made by kind of indie developers. And so when the mole is whacked, nobody complains. Or if they complain, you're not going to hear about it. Nobody really cares. When Elon complains, the world hears about it, right? There is an entire army of people who will come out and will have censorship right along with him.

28:09As I mentioned, again, we have now seen the expansion of that term to cover your perceived right to generate news of other people. As we've seen, Ashley St. Clair had the audacity to complain. She had her blue check revoked. She was demonetized, right? It was immediately made clear that that is the cost of complaining. When you do things to Elon's companies, all of a sudden you get tariffed, right? There are people who get their visas revoked because they have the audacity to implement fines on X for dishonest business practices, right? When X doesn't adhere to the terms of the Digital Services Act, that becomes an international issue.

28:49So the dynamics around regulating X are fraught to begin with. Because Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn have been very vocal on this. Right. So I'll get to them in just one second. But the other thing I'll say about this, though, is that the other the realistic point, though, is that the integration of Grok and X is a challenge. Right. So Malaysia and Indonesia block Grok. The challenge, though, is that people use X to communicate. It is a speech platform. And when you block X, you are blocking a lot of other types of speech that have nothing to do with nudification. And that is realistically one of the reasons why when I say it's sort of too big to block, it has a lot of other issues that go along with it.

29:27And so when you block the nudification piece, you have a lot of other kind of second order effects. But you also have Marsha Blackburn, who if you've heard her speak in tech hearings, she gets very, very upset about two things. One, AI doing bad things, right? You've heard her complain about, you know, where they say things like they make up accusations about conservatives and things like this. You'd think she'd be very upset about them nudifying women, right? She's a strong proponent of defending women. Two, defending children. These are people who support COSA. Josh Hawley has a very strong Christian populist sentiment in his kind of ethics underlying why he wants to see tech regulated, constantly writing letters to Zuckerberg asking him to account for himself.

30:07And the two of them were entirely silent about this. The person who spoke up was Ted Cruz, who spoke up but then also promptly posted a photo of himself with Elon, Right. So you have this this tension here, right, which is he knows this is wrong, but also is very, very afraid of being seen as challenging Elon, who is a major Republican Party donor. Right.

30:27Kara Swisher:He's just given 10 million dollars to Canada and Kentucky, for example. Krak isn't the only AI chatbot with vulnerabilities around D-Pix, obviously, or C-SPAN. Obviously, XAI seems to care less. But creating robust guardrails for a chatbot image generators is legally perilous. In order to fix any of the vulnerabilities, you have to find them. That means red teaming the chatbots, in other words, trying to get them to actually generate CSAM images in order to identify loopholes and close them. But because of the ways the laws are written, anyone red teaming a chatbot for CSAM might actually be breaking law.

30:59Kara Swisher:Honey, you've testified about this issue in CSAM. What would you like to see to help create a more robust infrastructure to fight it? Because that's one of the things that they, that's the problem here. Just like Ashley St. Clair suing and then being sued for suing. Yeah. Because she's not supposed to sue under the terms of service. So I do think, you know, we should add another component to this, that as somebody who has worked in the space and has viewed this content as part of my work, it is horrific. You don't want people looking at this. Even the fake stuff is gruesome and is the thing that nightmares are made of.

31:29But I do think it is necessary and we do need robust red teaming and we need mechanisms to make sure. And you're 100 % right that, you know, we continue to follow the path of move fast and break things. And, you know, look, some of these things are really hard problems, you know, and nobody's expecting perfection here. Nobody is saying you can never, ever, ever do this. But when you make it so easy, it is really inexcusable. And I think there are many, many things we can do from the guardrails on the training data. This is work that Renee has done on semantic guardrails on the input, semantic guardrails on the output.

32:05really vigorous red teaming. But the thing, of course, that you know is that none of this is good for profits, right? And so what we need here is really good either liability or regulatory overhead to create an incentive for the companies to do better. Because what we know is left to their own devices, they won't do better. And so it's on us as the public and as regulators and the court to force that upon them. Yeah.

32:28Kara Swisher:Now, they've also created a media narrative. So let's take a step back and analyze the larger implications for the debacle. Elon explicitly created Grok to be, quote, anti-woke. And the issue with the Grok image edit is, besides making it exceptionally easy to create these sexualized deepfakes, it's made it equally easy to use those images to humiliate and harass victims, as you've all noted. This is part of a much larger problem of bullying and denigrating women online. Casey, you've mentioned this is part and parcel of the larger trend of using harassment to, as you said, silence women, push them out of the public discourse.

32:58Kara Swisher:I'd love to hear E.G. talk about how this Grog Finesco fits in this larger systemic issue of harassment and silencing. Casey, you start, and then Renee, and then Hani. Well, I mean, look, women have never had an easy time online, right? Like going back to the earliest days of Twitter, you know, women were also having a terrible time. And, you know, under Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, the company also massively underinvested in tools that would just, you know, keep women not just safe, but also just feel comfortable participating. I think the fresh shock here is just that the company itself makes a tool that can strip a woman down to her underwear and shove that into her mentions.

33:37And the entire executive leadership team is just laughing it off, right? I mean, it's like a level of moral depravity I just didn't think we would get to in my lifetime, but now here we are. Mm hmm. Renee? I think I would just co-sign that. I think, again, it's where leadership has gone. It's the moral degradation on that front. I think we had seen a trend from 2015 with, you know, Gamergate and attitudes around how should we think about harassment and the fact that if you think about free expression, there was a balancing act, right? a recognition that certain types of speech push other types of users out of the conversation.

34:20And so you wanted to try to maximize that equity to create that environment that allowed the greatest possible number of users to continue to contribute. So saying we're going to allow these people to express themselves by creating nude images of those other people, right, means that those other people are going to exit and go somewhere else. They're going to cease contributing. Their speech is going to be stifled. They are going to be chilled. But it's almost like we've sort of reverted back 10 years into that view of equities and conversation as we've just decided that there's a kind of new sheriff in town and this one just doesn't care.

34:56Kara Swisher:Yeah, doesn't care. More than doesn't care. Thinks it's hysterical, honey. But remember, Kara, remember, you're not allowed to create an account on X that posts the recent whereabouts of Elon's plane because that would make him unsafe and it would make him feel like he can't speak. But if you wanted to strip down any women on X, that's fine. Fair point, Casey. Honey? Yeah, I'll add two things here. One is while women are the brunt of a lot of this, it's also all underrepresented groups have been targeted for years and continue to be targeted, including children. And so that umbrella is actually quite large of people who are being harassed online.

35:29The second thing, and I want to sort of reemphasize something Renee said, I always like it when people like Elon Musk talk about free speech because what he really means is free speech for me and people who agree with me. If you are a true believer in free speech, you want a platform that brings all voices, not just the voices of people who agree with you. And by allowing this type of content, you are in fact attacking free speech for lots and lots of people. And so if you want to be a free speech person, fine, be that. But let's at least be consistent with that worldview.

35:58Kara Swisher:Oh, you've noticed the hypocrisy? Shocking, isn't it? Shocking. It's been that way forever, actually. I know. And I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's, you know, I sort of really, that hypocrisy in particular really frustrates me. Because, first of all, I think there's lots of restrictions on free speech, first of all. But this is not a free speech issue. This is absolutely a red herring that is used to silence critics. That is correct. So the right obviously has also been obsessed with pedophilia. I was walking across Union Square Park this weekend and the QAnon people are still there, still there, still protesting something.

36:33Kara Swisher:Pizzagate and QAnon were about supposed pedophile rings. Obviously, so is the Epstein story, though that one is grounded in reality. And then there's the fixation with the drag queen story hour and calling LGBTQIA people groomers. And yet we see this casual attitude towards Elon and Grux exploitation and harassment of minors online. It's never been about pedophilia. It's never been about this. That's the point, right? We don't like some people. We're going to tag them with something that seems like it's impossible to ignore. And then when your own guy gets tagged with it, we are silent. This has never been about protecting children.

37:06Right.

37:06Kara Swisher:This is what Elon did to Yoel Roth. And as you all know, Yoel was the head of safety at Twitter before he just quit. And then the minute he quit, Elon attacked him for being a pedophile, which that's his go-to. Pedophilia is Elon's go-to. Trans or pedophilia is his go-to. Renee, you and many other researchers who study online hate, disinformation and misinformation and C-SPAN have essentially been harassed out of a job by MAGA lawsuits, congressional letters, funding threats, and now deportation threats. In the process, they've gutted organizations that research ways to fight CSAM and deep fakes, like your former employer, as you noted just earlier, the Stanford Internet Observatory.

37:44Kara Swisher:What's the current state of play when it comes to research on CSAM? Well, I mean, losing SIO is a really big deal. Well, when I got this, I got a text from a reporter, gosh, it might have been like New Year's Day, I think, talking about some of what was happening and saying, hey, I've got this, I have this tip, this person saying they think they have AI-generated CSAM. I don't know what to do with it. And I said, well, you know, don't look at it. Right, right, right. But then there's this question of like, OK, where do we send it? And, you know, I was kind of DMing with my former colleagues trying to figure out, all right, well, who can we send this to?

38:23We used to have special mechanisms for dealing with it. And obviously there's like NICMEC and a bunch of other places. But as far as like researchers who are still in the space, this question of who are the research groups that are still equipped to do certain types of work on this. I think there are different groups that had different specialties that are no longer operational in part because of the funding cuts and other things where, you know, saying the rather gleeful dismantling of research centers because maybe they studied misinformation or maybe they had the audacity to say the 2020 election wasn't rigged and stolen, you know, which it wasn't.

39:03Right. So it doesn't exist. Right, exactly. Well, I mean, SIO shut down as a result of that. I think I'm heading into year three of the litigation to court cases against us. And Jim Jordan sent yet another letter to Stanford complaining about researcher speech. You know, they had a dinner apparently with a funny of Julian McGrath and a few people, which Michael Schellenberger and Jim Jordan reframed as some sort of censorship cabal. So they sent another letter demanding emails to try to get to the bottom of that. And so the harassment continues. The stupid conspiracy theories continue. And meanwhile, the question of who does important work to actually solve real problems, you know, the centers that used to really specialize in that get shut down.

39:54Kara Swisher:Do not exist. And they continue to ask someone like you, especially that ever idiotic Michael Schellenberger. Honey, your work has been somewhat controversial, though, in the industry. People that are not Michael Schellenberger, like Mike Masnick, the founder of TechDivac, feel you're too willing to compromise the privacy rights of everyone who uses the Internet in order to try to catch people who create. or distribute CSAM. Give us your best-faith version of your critics' argument and then explain the trade-offs between privacy and child safety online and why you think they're worth it. Well, first, let's acknowledge that there is tension here between privacy and safety.

40:28And that's not a strictly online thing. It's an offline thing, too. When I go to the airport, they get to look through my bags and my person. So there's a trade-off we have to make. And so one position to say is absolute privacy for everybody and safety is a second, third thought. The other is privacy for nobody, and that's a problem also. So I think reasonable people can disagree here. My position has been this. When we talk about privacy, we should talk about privacy for everybody, not just you and me. Because when I talk about safety measures for children, that is a privacy issue for the children.

41:05And so I reject this notion that I'm throwing privacy under the bus. Right now the argument that i've heard that is go something like this that if you do this Go searching for child sexual abuse material. Well, then you will enable people to do xyz the slippery slope argument And the reality is that when we built photo dna back in the day We heard those same arguments and it just was not true People said to me in my face you are going to destroy the internet you will destroy speech and it was not true I reject the notion that we can't have reasonable safety measures and reasonable privacy. This notion that everything absolutely has to be end-to-end encrypted and nobody gets to do anything, I think sort of defies the sniff test when it comes to the physical world.

41:53Nobody would say that when you go to the airport, nobody's allowed to look in your bag because it's a privacy issue. So what I would like is for this to stop being a conversation about privacy and safety because this is an issue of privacy for everybody and a safety for everybody. And I think as we have done in the physical world, we have to find a compromise. And I think that that is not a conversation that has been particularly healthy in the last few years.

42:15Kara Swisher:Yeah, I don't know why it shifts so drastically when it comes to online child pornography. I find it strange. I find it strange, too. And here's the thing. I mean, maybe 20 years ago we could talk about an online world and an offline world. There's no distinction anymore. There's no online and offline world. There's the world. It's one world. And we have to start coming to grips with that. We'll be back in a minute.

43:04Kara Swisher:dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial ingredients. I've tried their bars and their mixes, and they're quite good. I really like them. I use a lot of energy bars, and I mostly don't like them. They don't taste good. They taste like cardboard. These are actually really flavorful. I've tried their mixes, very good, and they're giving me all the nutrients I need, and they're very easy and on the go. With over 20 ,000 five-star reviews and counting, more people than ever are fueling their busy lives with IQ bars, brain and body boosting bars, hydration mixes, and mushroom coffees. Their ultimate sampler pack includes all three.

43:37Kara Swisher:Again, I've tried them all. They're all excellent. And some of these things, as people know, aren't. And right now IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20 % off all IQ Bar products, including the ultimate sampler pack, a good way to test this stuff out, plus free shipping. To get your 20 % off, text CARA to 64 ,000. Text CARA to 64 ,000. That's CARA, K-A-R-A to 64 ,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details.

44:08Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. Law is a craft forged through repetition, sharpened by judgment, perfected in the details most people never see. Practice Made Perfect is Harvey's belief in relentless refinement, in turning complexity into clarity, pressure into precision, and experience into advantage. Legal work isn't just about knowing the law. It's about applying it carefully, consistently, and under real stakes. Harvey is an AI platform built specifically for the legal practice, helping teams analyze large volumes of documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across complex matters.

44:45Kara Swisher:It doesn't replace expertise. It strengthens it, making teams faster, more exacting, more certain. Today, more than half of the AM Law 100 use Harvey as part of their workflow. Learn more at Harvey.ai. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin. Way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with Kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak. Got that right. Let's wrap up talking about accountability or lack thereof, really.

45:34Kara Swisher:There may not be any accountability around this whole ordeal. It boosted Grok's downloads, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Pentagon will be integrating Grok into its workflows. And nothing happened with Apple and Google around not doing anything. They didn't get any—they didn't get shamed. They were not—they never responded. So what's the takeaway from this whole episode? So it'll be just another grimy chapter of the story of X and Grok, like the Mecca Hitler tweets or explicit Taylor Swift deepfakes going viral on X. Is there any possibility of real change? I think that to the extent there's going to be real change, it's just going to come from outside the United States.

46:12I do think that X's existence is just going to become more complicated in more countries around the world. It's going to become more of a headache for Elon. So maybe we'll see some measure of accountability there. If you're looking for any sort of silver lining here, though, I would just say that the fact that Grok has to stoop to these levels just show you how unsuccessful it is compared to its rivals. The introduction of its porn chatbot last year was just explicitly a way to try to boost engagement for what is essentially the fourth or fifth place AI company. So to me, this is just a sign of increasing desperation over there to get something working.

46:55And yeah, so that's what I would say about that.

46:58Kara Swisher:And then dress it up like free speech, essentially. Yeah. So, Honey, a review by Wired Magazine shows Grok is creating violent sexual images and videos with minors in them that is much worse than what's being posted on X. We assume the malicious actors are going to find ways to use AI to create illegal deepfakes in CSAM. What sort of AI tools can you imagine would be useful in combating the distribution of these images while respecting these privacy rights you talked about and minimizing false positives that can tar an innocent person's reputation, for example? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, first, like everything in cyberspace, this is an adversarial system, right?

47:31Like spam, malware, and ransomware. It's a give and take, and it's going to be a back and forth. There are, I mean, if you go to OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, and you try to put in the same prompts that you put into Grok, it won't work. So we have an existence proof that we can have reasonable measures in place. And this is the way it works. You solve 80 % of the problem relatively quickly, and then you start chipping it away with a combination of red teaming and responsible reporting mechanisms. And we get to a steady state the way we have with spam. It's a mostly manageable problem these days.

48:04But that takes effort, and it takes years and years and years to do that. And it takes will and it takes leadership. And my thing, if I can come back to the question that you asked Casey is, I think there's, there's one positive thing that has come out of this, which is the really loud outrage from the media about what is happening. And I think it, I article after article after article, just really hammering. And I think that's good to see that there is some consequence to this. Number one, number two is I don't think regulation is going to get us out of this just because it takes so long. And it's so imperfect in the way it's crafted.

48:41And of course, the lobbyists are going to beat the hell out of the regulation before it sees the light of day. I think where this starts to get traction is with liability. So putting aside how Elon Musk is threatening people. But if we start suing these companies back to the dark ages, they will internalize that cost and they will make safer products. And so I'm looking to the courts for relief here because I think that's the fastest way to get relief.

49:02Kara Swisher:You're absolutely right. You have sued the bastards. That's what I said. But Renee, we're talking about very dark, disturbing trends, and the underlying assumption behind your work is that we can have a better internet. So paint a positive picture. Let's imagine a world 10 years from now where there's a momentum towards creating a safer online world, something I've talked about a decade ago, speaking of which, one of less hate and harassment. What does it look like? What would you need to do? What are the pieces that you need to put in place? I mean, some of it is, as Ani mentions, there is the courts, right?

49:32There's the FTC also, which I haven't heard anybody mention. But I know. Oh, please feel free. Well, Baron Soka and some other folks are writing about consumer protection powers. I don't know if this FTC will do it again because of the unfortunate, you know, integration of Elon into the Republican Party and the political tensions there. But but that that's another potential option. Brandon has has an enormous crush on him.

49:53Kara Swisher:It's a little bit untoward, frankly. But one of the things that we saw. I may create an image or something. I don't know. There's the exit versus voice phenomenon, right? Users have voice. They can say, we don't like this. We don't want it. You should, I would hope, see more conservatives on the platform saying this isn't appropriate. This isn't right. This isn't normal. That's what I would have wanted to see instead of people falling in line behind the censorship bullshit. But the other thing is exit. You can leave. There are other platforms. You can go there, right? Threads is a little weird, but it exists.

50:29Blue sky is a little weird in some ways, but it exists. There are alternatives and users can vote with their feet and at some point they're going to have to. And just to say, this isn't normal and that's the other option. And that's where you just say, there are other places to go. There are other places to be. There's Instagram, there's TikTok, which didn't ever actually get banned, right? There's so many different options. It's not that they're necessarily good, but there are alternatives. And that But user outcry in the United States in particular has done more to move platforms in various directions with their policies than any regulation because we haven't had any regulation here.

51:10And that is, I think, the last lever really available to say that this isn't OK. We don't want it. It's not moral. It's not ethical. And we should be doing something different.

51:18Kara Swisher:Yeah. Yeah. I do my best by calling it a Nazi porn bar, as you know, all the time. But it seems to have caught on a little bit. So if we take a step back, this episode with Grok is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues created by unregulated AI. I'd like each of you to finish up by talking about what else is coming our way, what worries you most. What is the thing you're thinking about next if you had to anticipate? I mean, I think we have anticipated that Elon will do the very worst thing given the choice. But what worries you the most and what do you think is coming our way? Casey, then Hani, and then Renee.

51:52To me, the worst aspect of Elon's underinvestment in content moderation and basically just like rejection of it as something that anyone should do is that it has just lowered the bar for every other player in the industry. Like, Meta is so much worse now than it was before Elon bought Twitter. And it's just because they feel no pressure to do even half the stuff they used to because they look at what Elon gets away with and they think, well, you know, what does it matter if we're going to get 10 % of our revenue from literal scams this year, right? Or you look at Roblox and all the issues that they've had with child predators, and they just look at it as, ah, that's just a compliance function.

52:33Let's go ahead and do the bare minimum. So to me, that's the real issue here is that when there is someone who is so publicly able to get away with the worst things imaginable on their platform, everybody else follows suit because it's cheaper.

52:47Kara Swisher:That's a very good point. Is there something coming that worries you? I mean, the thing that worries me is just that we're already in a world where people have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. The underlying models continue to get more powerful. There's a huge contingent, particularly on the left, that thinks that AI is fake and a bubble and is all going to collapse tomorrow when, you know, open AI can't pay a bill. And so I think a lot of us are just sort of sleepwalking into a future where the media environment becomes ever more challenging and dangerous. And it doesn't seem like many people in power want to do much about that.

53:20Kara Swisher:Good point. Hani, then Renee. Sure. I mean, a lot of things keep me up at night these days. But here's Bill Gates had this great line many years ago. He said we tend to overestimate what tech will do in one year and underestimate what it will do in 10 years. And that's been true for quite a while. I think in the age of AI, that 10 years is probably closer to five years and maybe three years. I think the world is going to look very different in three years. And here's the thing I'm looking at, particularly for 2026, which is the age of agentic AI is upon us. So everything we have talked about for the last 45 minutes or so has been humans in the loop.

53:56Humans are powering this in terms of creating the content and then sharing it and liking it. But soon what we are going to see is fully deployed agentic AI, state-sponsored cyber criminals, individuals will have agents doing the work for them. Fully automatic, 24 hours a day, no sleep, no moral, no fear of arrest. And that's going to be a very weird world that we are entering in. And I think cybersecurity in general is going to explode with attacks from agents that are working 24-7 and adapting very, very quickly. And we've already started to see attack from AI-written malware and ransomware. And I think the world of agentic AI, more likely than not in the next 12 to 18 months, is upon us.

54:41And I think that is going to change an awful lot.

54:43Kara Swisher:So supersize this. It's already difficult and a huge problem. Okay. Renee? Yeah, I would concur on that. I think it's the prevalence of fraud. I think the financial industry is beginning to realize that systems it had built, using voice as an authenticator, insurers have been using voice as an authenticator. A lot of systems that were a lot of money invested thinking that this was going to be secure, the realization it is not secure, and efforts to try to find things that are. The privacy tradeoffs with things like biometrics that people are very uncomfortable with, particularly in the hands of governments, and yet at the same time the recognition that there have to be mechanisms for credentialing in some way in part to mitigate fraud.

55:23Right. So what are those tradeoffs going to look like? What is that? What is a privacy protecting identity layer look like? Again, recognizing that people don't want the government to control it. And yet the private sector options are not great either. So that's an area that I've been looking at a lot lately and wondering, you know, what on earth happens on that front. And what worries you the most in this area? You know, we've got another election cycle coming up right now. I think those questions around trust and legitimacy are going to play out very heavily in the race. You know, I've never been in an AI election doomer.

55:58I think there's always been that it's going to matter in some way. We should prepare. We should recognize it as a threat and yet not overreact. And so, again, yet another cycle coming up, gearing up for that because we have an incredible, you know, real fractured trust environment here. And we've seen the technology advance a lot over the last two years. And we're going to see what that looks like going into this next cycle.

56:24Kara Swisher:All right. But we can be sure Leland will do something repulsive. Anyway, never underestimate his repulsiveness. Anyway, goodbye and thank you so much, Renee, Hani, and Casey. It's a really important topic. I'm going to keep coming back to it all year around chatbots, around kids, around suicide, around everything because they're not going to do anything about it. As you said, the media certainly can. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Kara. Thanks, Kara. Thanks, Kara. Thanks.

56:56Kara Swisher:today's show was produced by christian castor-russell michelle eloy megan burney and kaylin lynch nishat kurwa is vox media's executive producer of podcasts special thanks to katherine barner our engineers are fernando aruta and rick kwan and our theme music is by trackademics go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with kara swisher and hit follow thanks for listening to on with kara swisher from podium media new york magazine the vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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