AI, Deep Fakes, and the US Election

0:00All of us together are living through the death of an old world and the birth of a new one. This is a fourth turning, but this is not the fourth turning of demographics or politics. This is the birth of the new technological age. This new world has a world of 3D printed rockets, crypto payments in space, discussions on the rights for humanoid robots, machine intelligence that may outperform our own, simulated worlds where autonomous AI agents write code for other autonomous AI agents. It's a world full of opportunity and full of difficulty too. You see, we are living history and it's happening much, much faster than any of us can comprehend.

0:44This is Reid's law, Metcalfe's law squared. Humanity has never gone through anything like this. But we have to comprehend and understand what is happening. It is into this world that the Exponentialist is born. The Exponentialist is a new service from me, Raoul Pal, and David Matten, author of New World, Same Humans. It's an almanac of the fastest period of change ever witnessed in the human history. A period of excitement, exhilaration, difficulty and terror. And The Exponentialist really is for humans first and investors second. Yes, the opportunities are enormous all round. To find out more and get our special launch pricing, go to realvision.com forward slash the future.

1:36Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

1:54I want to talk about something that I don't think anybody is thinking through yet. And I think it's one of the most important things for the next 12 months. And it's about the election. And this is nothing about politics. It's actually something much bigger. What I'm worried about is we could tear apart the fabric of society as we go into the US election. We all know that the US is a hugely polarized country. That big split really started happening around the time Donald Trump was elected. Now, it's not necessarily a Donald Trump thing. It was that polarization of something I've talked about a lot, which was the holing out of the middle classes, where middle America got holed out and the cities got holed out, and different people started to blame somebody else for the problem.

2:48And I've talked a lot about the problems were really demographics. Too many people in the workforce at the same time competing for the same jobs against technology and foreign labor as well. Those things were bad. And that made it, people realized the American dream was dying on them. And people got angry. And they started blaming each other. And then we started seeing this political system split further and further apart. And we've seen it split. Yet, that split get exacerbated in social media online. The rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets gave people a place to vent, and then find their own sub-communities, so they didn't hear the other side of the story.

3:32And then what we found is evidence of state actors purposely driving people apart to create discontent in the United States, the UK, and many other countries. That's old news. We know that happened. We also know that other people with vested interests also try and cause these splits. Now whether that's sort of corporations, or whether it's driven by the political parties themselves, or people just trying to attack the system in various ways. But what I'm really worried about is something much bigger. It's AI in the election. People are not thinking through a world where which everything we see online may not be real.

4:22See, in a world that operates at Twitter speed, you see a story, you absorb a story, you kind of believe that story. You're not used to checking exactly what the source of something is. If it says it's from the New York Times or Fox or wherever your news outlets are, you believe it. If you see a politician saying it, you believe they said it. If you see your favorite influencer saying something, you believe they said it. If you see a news headline, you believe it to be true. The problem is, in a world of AI, nothing needs to be true. You see, AI technology has exploded onto the scene. It started just with a lot of written word stuff.

5:06So AI can generate articles at scale, unlike we've ever seen before. So that means we can create millions of messages for different people all at the same time. That was kind of the social media strategy we saw in the 2016-2020 elections, Brexit and other circumstances. But this is much more nuanced because you can really make different messages for different people at scale much faster. Okay, fine. We understand that. We also understand that we're seeing AI bots all across social media replying to pretending to be people when they're not. They're just there and they're incentivized to create debate, anger and emotional reaction.

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6:51But that's not what I'm worried about either. What I'm really worried about is the AI that's been driven by things like mid-journey. And that's photography and video AI and voice AI. You see, we are very close. In fact, we're experimenting with Real Vision with this as well. Very close to being able to deliver AI images of me talking. And you can't tell it's not me. in my voice, with my face, my lips moving, and no discernible way of telling whether it's me or not. Now, on one hand, it's great. As somebody in social media, I can scale myself in a one-to-one experience. But really, the issue is, is anybody can scrape content from YouTube and create, let's say, a rattle bot or a video of me saying anything.

7:51And then when you have an election, you can have any politician saying anything to anyone, and you don't know if it's real or not. We've all seen the Pope in the puffer jacket. We've seen Peter Diamandis talking to a Peter Diamandis video bot. And you can't tell the bloody difference. How are we going to deal with a complete breakdown of trust? When there is no trust anywhere, people become more paranoid, more scared, more angry. If something you believe to be true is then shown to you not to be true, you don't trust anything at all. Actually, the Russians used to use this a long time ago when they invented propaganda.

8:34It's been a very good way of creating propaganda is you break down trust entirely so nobody knows who to trust. So if you're being attacked by your enemy who may be saying something truthful, nobody believes anything anymore. And that's an old tactic. It's kind of mind warfare. And I think that's coming. And it's all going to start kicking off, let's say, from January, but really hyper-escalating from probably around June onwards. Now, the concerning part is the technology is moving at exponential speed. The warp factor 10 element of how good AI is getting. If you see the journey of mid-journey, the kind of images that were out three months ago versus now, we're now a pure photorealism.

9:21You can tell mid-journey that you want it filmed in a 1964 Hasselblad camera shot in the streets of Stockholm at 7pm in a June summer's day, and you want it looking in the character of Herb Ritz. It will do that. It's extraordinary. So we can create anything. We can create a story of Joe Biden coming on saying the Russians have invaded. We can have any news about China. We can make people believe any single thing. I worry what this means for all of us. And I worry how we find trust in this. And what does it mean for financial markets? How can people manipulate markets? You can create any news story that completely evaporates trust, markets collapse.

10:18And that moment, people can profit from it. How do you trust even price action anymore? It's going to get crazy, and people are going to lose their fucking minds. And the idea is to make you lose your mind. That is the whole purpose. So really, I'm asking you all, American and not American, to just be very careful in how you deal with what you see online. We're going to have to figure out whole new ways for society to function in this kind of world. Trust is going to be everything. Now, I've talked about this before. We are going to end up, I think, with a bunch of these social media companies, Twitter, Facebook, and others, YouTube, they're going to get prosecuted like the banks.

11:06They're going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of fines if we're not careful because of what happens, what's served on their platforms over the election. You know, Instagram is so perfect for this. You just scroll through it and you don't know what's real. You assume it is. And I think the tech companies are going to get severely into big trouble over it. AI regulation will come in force. What does it mean for that industry? I don't know. But I do know that blockchain technology is one of the answers. We need digital ID. We need some way of authenticating who's me, who's Raoul Pal. Now the authentication can use zero knowledge proofs, which means my information is private, but I can prove who I am online.

11:53We so desperately need this. I've been talking about it for a while. and you are all going to see why over the next 12 months. And you're going to wish we had it. And then we're going to have to figure out content authentication. Because how the hell do you know what is authentic content? Because even the AI is not good enough at spotting what's AI any longer. The world is getting really blurry. It's getting really blue with everything. Everything you read, everything you see, everything you hear. Nothing is real. So we need some sort of authentication system. But one thing I urge you to do, apart from not losing your mind, which is the single most important thing, check everything.

12:33Don't believe anything, but not from the point of mistrust, from the point of verify it. Verify what is real and what is not. But then the important thing is to have trusted sources. This is the first time really where a paywall matters. So something like Real Vision is great because we can trust Real Vision. We have people that we know. It's authenticated because it's behind our paywall. We film the content. We post the content. If you're watching from behind our paywall, you know that that economic discourse, the market discourse that we have on Real Vision is real content. Okay, that is something useful.

13:11And we will obviously, throughout the election period, make sure that we have the broad range of analysis from broadly different opinions, because that matters too to us. But others, find the right things with the paywall. Don't trust what you see in social media feeds. The paywall is going to be vital. And I know this is not an advert for paywall or Real Vision or anything else. But it is really important to figure out how to navigate this properly. Find the sources that you can trust and go to the direct source of that information. Please don't use Twitter as your source of truth. Do not use Instagram.

13:51Do not use TikTok. Do not use YouTube as your source of truth. Even if you see me on YouTube, just in your feed, not on our channel. If it's on our channel, it's most likely me. But it might not be. And I could be telling you to buy some scammy NFT or some gold mining company in Canada. Whatever it is, it's not going to be me. We're already seeing this problem with text messages and fake spam emails, but this scales to an incredible array of use cases, most of them nefarious. Be careful when you send money to anybody for anything. Make sure you verify it all. So look, society is fragile enough as it is.

14:37And I really worry how severe this could be. And I don't think it will have escaped the attention of state actors. If you want to weaken the United States, turn the people against themselves. Again, that's a very famous strategy that most big sovereign states have done themselves. The US has done it in other countries. Russia has done it. China's done it. Israel's done it. And many other nation states have done it. But at this scale, at this speed, with this technology, that's never been done before. So anyway, good luck out there. And again, don't trust, verify. Take care.

15:36world of 3D printed rockets, crypto payments in space, discussions on the rights for humanoid robots, machine intelligence that may outperform our own, simulated worlds where autonomous AI agents write code for other autonomous AI agents. It's a world full of opportunity and full of difficulty too. You see, we are living history and it's happening much, much faster than any of us can comprehend. This is Reed's law, Metcalfe's law squared. Humanity has never gone through anything like this. But we have to comprehend and understand what is happening. It is into this world that The Exponentialist is born.

16:19The Exponentialist is a new service from me, Raoul Pal, and David Matin, author of New World, St. Hulens. It's an almanac of the fastest period of change ever witnessed in the human history. A period of excitement, exhilaration, difficulty and terror. And the exponentialist really is for humans first and investors second. Yes, the opportunities are enormous all round. To find out more and get our special launch pricing, go to realvision.com forward slash the future.