Can we prove we’re real online?

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0:30they want to do. To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains. A man straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack. He whispers to himself, it's time to put my balls on the dashboard. As he starts the engine. In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance unconscious. In 15 years, he's a billionaire. This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of Drive to Survive. This week on Good, Bad, Billionaire, how Toto Wolff made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Guys, I gotta jump in here before we get started because there is a podcast emergency that we need to deal with.

1:15This week, a jury in California found that Meta and Google deliberately made their platforms addictive and are now responsible for some mental health crises that their users experience. This could ultimately lead to billions of dollars in damages. It could change the history of social media. They're calling this social media's big tobacco moment, like those lawsuits in the 90s. But the problem is we record our show on Tuesdays, so we didn't get the chance to address this in the episode you're about to hear, but it's a huge story. We're going to be following it, so stay tuned.

1:51There is literally nothing that you could do that would prove to me for certain that you were not an AI. I don't want my brain to be enslaved after I die. No, thank you. Even if the Strait of Hormuz like reopened, the effects of the war are already going to be felt for a very long time.

2:13Hello and welcome to The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Nicky Wolfe. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Thomas Germain, or am I? Today on The Interface, we're going to talk about how I tried to prove I'm not an AI, and it didn't go well. Also, can you control a computer with your brain? And how the war in Iran could crash the world of AI.

2:45Okay, guys, we've got a massive update before we get started, which is that a judge in Nevada has ordered Calci, which is one of these online prediction markets, one of the two big ones, Calci and Polymarket, to stop trading. It's the first time one of these markets has faced any kind of order to stop. And there's also legislation being introduced in the U.S. which would regulate some of these markets. And on the same day that we got news, the Senate had introduced this law to regulate Calci and Polymarket, both of the companies announced that they have new insider trading policies. So you can't bet on stuff.

3:23I mean, it's different for different platforms. If you have influence over the outcome of an event, they're saying like, well, you're not gonna be able to bet anymore. It seems like things are really hitting the fan for these companies. They got so big, so fast in a way that's like kind of new for the tech industry. And already we're actually seeing some kind of regulatory action, which is not how things used to be. It used to take like 10 years before Congress would wake up and be like, hey, maybe somebody should do something about this biggest company in the world. So progress. I don't know.

3:52On a different note, we asked last week for our listeners and our viewers whether or not you choose the voice for your voice assistants and if so, what criteria you use. And we got a pretty interesting comment from one of our longtime listeners, John Bartle. He was a former director at Microsoft and mentioned that when he was at the company, they did in fact have lots of conversations internally about this idea that voice assistants were generally defaulted to female voices and that this could potentially have structural biases or change user behaviors. And so he and his friends within the company actually did an experiment where they changed some of their voices to different accents.

4:40He specifically chose a male voice for his Siri. This was not an initiative by the company. It was just something that they were kind of chatting amongst each other about as employees. And he said that it sparked some really interesting conversations because it did indeed shift their behaviors when they used a different voice than the default. And it caused people to pause when they heard his mail Siri and it would then lead to conversations about the bias. So thanks so much for writing in, John. No, that's really cool. We love hearing from listeners, especially if they're executives at gigantic tech companies.

5:21Any secrets in particular? Those are our favorite kinds of comments. And if you would like to send us those secrets, you can email us at theinterface at bbc.com or you can WhatsApp us at plus 44-333-207-2472. We also like it if you just say hi. We love that. Okay, so Tom, are you real? Because I'm hearing very mixed things about this at the moment. I'm not really sure anymore after a couple experiments that I've done over the last week, which is unsettling, I got to say. But there's been a ton of news in the last week or two that all centers around this idea that we've been hearing about for years.

6:07this idea that we were careening towards this turning point where things have become so unclear with the world of AI that it's impossible to detect what actually is going on and sort through the noise. So I want to talk about some of the news, but before we do, I want to tell you about this experiment that I did. So you hear about deepfakes all the time, right? And the concern is always that like someone is going to call you impersonating a family member, or there's going to be, you know, some people are going to, you know, impersonate the president and put out this AI video at Swain Election or something like that.

6:44The idea is always that you're going to be the victim. But I was thinking, what if it's the other way around? What if instead of you getting fooled by a deep fake, the accusation comes in that you're AI, which is something that I think in the near future is a question that's going to be coming up more and more often, right? You hear about this on job interviews, that like people who are interviewing over Zoom like have to do things to prove that they're not like some kind of AI avatar that's doing the interview for them. You see this a lot in news as well, where a real story will come out and people will go, that's fake, that's AI.

7:19Yeah. It's been happening with the Iran war. Yeah, right. So I wanted to find out if it came down to it, could I prove in a moment when I'm talking to someone that I am not a robot? So I called up my Aunt Eleanor and I told her I was working on an article. I just published a story about this in my column. And I told her I was doing an experiment and I wanted her to figure out whether or not she could tell if it was the real Tom Germain or if I was fooling her with an AI. Did you create an AI version of yourself to play side by side with you? I did not. No. I just wanted to raise the suspicion, right?

8:01You're poor Aunt Eleanor. You would think it would be like, well, of course you're not AI. I can tell. Like, it looks real. Like, you're talking normally, right? Yeah. But once you had that doubt, things kind of started to fall apart. So at first she was like, oh, well, it sounds like you. And, you know, I don't think an AI would have the same inflection as a human being. Like, it sounds really realistic. And I said, well, that's true, but they're getting pretty advanced, right? And all of a sudden, I could just feel this doubt. come over her. And she's like, well, you know, I think it's you, but I can't be 100 % sure, right?

8:40And like, I could tell, this is actually very upsetting for her. Like, I had to apologize. But I am not the first person to go through something like this. It actually just happened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe you guys heard about this? Oh, this is when people thought he was dead. People still do. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, Netanyahu posted this video on his Twitter account of him giving a speech. And at one point, he kind of goes like this. And there's like a reflection on his palm. And if you freeze frame it just the right second, it kind of looks like a glitchy sixth finger, maybe.

9:17Which is like used to be the hallmark of AI, right? That it was like an AI image or video generator would add extra fingers. and immediately the internet exploded with rumors that Netanyahu had been killed in a missile strike and Israel was putting up AI deepfakes of him to hide the truth that the prime minister was dead. A couple days later, he posted another video of like himself in a coffee shop where he was like holding up his hands being like, see, right number of fingers, guys. So he was having to specifically address these rumors. This is, according to all the experts I talked to, the first time that the leader of a major world power has like openly and explicitly come out and tried to prove saying like, I'm not AI, I'm a real person.

10:00I think that's a serious turning point. We've seen this with like smaller countries. We've seen times when like leaders were maybe doing this without saying it to address some rumor, but we've reached the point where the head of one of the most powerful countries in the world has to actually say out loud, I am not dead. I am not an AI. I'm a real person. And it did not work. That's the thing about conspiracy theories. It's kind of beautiful in a way, right? Like everything you hear once you believe a conspiracy theory is either just more evidence for the conspiracy or like evidence of a cover-up or something like that.

10:34It's almost everything is proof of the conspiracy once you're within that world. Exactly, right? There's this idea that I'm sure you guys have heard about called the liar's dividend. Yeah, the liar's dividend is such a fascinating concept because it's this idea that in order to prove that something is real, it actually is very costly. But to point at something real and say it's fake is free. And so there's this incentive for, you know, for authoritarian governments to just undermine the evidence of different things by calling out real things as fake. For, you know, conspiracy theorists to do this.

11:16basically anyone that wants to throw a little bit of chaos into the information ecosystem to say, yeah, like, are we really sure that this is legitimate? Exactly. Right. And this is, we've been seeing this for years and years and years, kind of before this whole AI conversation started in the public eye, really before it took off, at least like, you know, attacks on the media, right? Like decrying anything inconvenient as fake news. But now this is coming back to bite the very people who are in a position of power to abuse this new ability to like make everything suspect. And Netanyahu like actively went out and maybe not the best strategy, you know, to add fuel to the fire, be like, I'm not dead.

12:02What are you talking about? It's probably just going to make people more suspicious. But people were not assuaged by this. Netanyahu is not dead, I can tell you that. And I can also tell you that there's probably people listening right now who are like, oh, see, there we go. These guys are part of the conspiracy too. The BBC is like doing you know, like... How can you be so sure, Tom? How do you know? Actually, that would be good. Like, the PSYOP would be if I didn't even know that I was part of it, right? The problem, as you said, Karen, is how can you be sure? And if we're getting to a point where you can never be 100 % sure, that's that's a disaster i've always felt with the topic of defects that people people used to say like this is going to be the end of truth but i always felt that that was not quite right it was to me the end of certainty which is a slightly different thing but it's exactly what you're saying nikki that like the doubt that people have and this is the exact effect that you saw on your Aunt Eleanor, Tom, like this, this like insidious doubt that kind of creeps in where you don't trust your senses anymore.

13:13You don't trust the things that you feel you should intimately know. And that kind of erodes away people's solid ground that they stand on. Yeah. Well, you know, I was talking to my Aunt Eleanor, not exactly, you know, like she's not, she's not a leading authority on AI, right? So I called some of the leading experts on AI DeepFace. I talked to this professor named Hani Farid at the University of California, Berkeley, often called the father of digital forensics. We got on a video call and I asked him, is there anything that I could do right now to prove to you as we are on this call that I'm not an AI?

13:51And he said like, well, you know, there's things I could do to like make myself a little more certain, but there is literally nothing that you could do in this moment unless we get off the call and take some additional steps that would prove to me for certain that you were not an AI. There's no way it's over. We're past that point. What were those additional steps? Well, he said, you know, he's got a whole company called Get Real Security where they're working on this stuff now. And he's like, I've got a platform that I could put you on that has like software built in that, you know, does facial analysis and other things and like has all these different systems built in that would check, that would work.

14:27He said, I could do additional steps to make sure that like, like contact the BBC and things like that and make sure I'm actually speaking to you like get a third party to verify it. But in the context of this phone call, he's like, you know, you could wave your hand in front of your face, right? That usually if it's an AI deepfake, that'll make it glitch. But even that I couldn't be certain. And that's like world class expert, right? We're in big trouble here. And generally, the only thing you can do is to pay attention to context, to say, wait, does this news pass the smell test? Let me check a few more sources.

15:03Really difficult to spot unless you really, but everyone now kind of has to do their own digital forensics to a certain extent. And that's just by context. And this isn't just about individual people like, you know, you and me having to prove that we're real and not AI, which is a thing that's going to start happening more and more often. You're going to be in some emergency. You're going to be talking to someone. They're going to be like, wait, like, are you a scammer? Is something happening? But on a much larger scale, what we're already seeing is this playing out with public figures on the internet.

15:31And in particular, there was this story from the Washington Post about this fake MAGA girl. It's the opposite problem, which is there's people online who are fake that people en masse are believing is a real person. and in particular, there's this woman called Jessica Foster, this woman, there's an AI influencer called Jessica Foster, who people have just fallen in love with all across the internet. People have included talk, have fallen in love with all across the internet. This friend of mine, Drew Harwell, did an investigation into this in the Washington Post. Turns out, I mean, you could tell from looking at it, if you know what to look for, that this is obviously not a real person, but millions of people had fallen for it.

16:09It's just, you know, she's like this army girl. He asked the US Army to look into it. they don't have a record of a Jessica Foster. You can tell it's AI from looking at her. But millions of followers, millions of people are following her. She had an OnlyFans account after Drew contacted them. They took it down because you have to be a real person to have an OnlyFans account. Like you can post AI stuff of yourself on OnlyFans, but if there is no real person, then that platform doesn't allow it. But people were just completely duped by this, even though it's like so... How is this? you know a hot woman taking all these selfies with all these world leaders and then leading you to it to an only fancy yeah exactly there was like a picture of her in the strait of hormuz right like yeah i think there was one where she was arresting nicolas maduro in venezuela right it's like wow this woman really gets around and she's on only fans like what what a dream you know but people are not trained to be thinking about this in that way right even though like it's Like it seemed we're past the Rubicon, but our brains are still catching up.

17:16Society is still catching up. And it's happened so fast. And it goes back to the liars' dividend as well, which is that especially for people in positions of power who don't mind using this, people not knowing what's real, people not knowing what's true, is hugely an advantage of people who want to abuse that power, want to be not caught doing bad things when they can just say, oh, that's AI, I want to pretend that something has happened when it hasn't happened. Right. This has much more bad outcomes than good outcomes. So back on the phone with my Aunt Eleanor, you know, she had prepared like a couple of tests for me.

17:54She was like reading me some jokes she found on Facebook to see if my reaction felt real. And it was like, you know, they were kind of funny. I was laughing, I was playing along. She's like, okay, I think this is, this seems like you. and then we'd switch and we started talking about she's going to knit me a sweater and years ago she made me it's very sweet she made me this really nice gold sweater and she's going to make me another one and I was like you know I was thinking maybe maybe we should just do something boring like black or navy I know looks good I'll wear them or off and all of a sudden she was like that sounds like a robot I thought you were going to ask for another gold one I'm like, sincerely, like that was the thing of the whole conversation.

18:36That was what really threw her off. That I didn't want another, like this can't be the real you. Do you tend to lean towards colorful sweaters? Is that? Typically, no, which is why I went for the gold. I mean, I'm wearing like a nice dark blue sweater right now. I was stepping out. So really the gold sweater, I think, is what the robot version of me would ask for in reality. Can you wear the gold sweater for the next recording? Yeah, I'll pull it out for sure.

19:04It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains. A man straps himself into a car on the world's most dangerous racetrack. He whispers to himself, It's time to put my balls on the dashboard. As he starts the engine. In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance, unconscious. In 15 years, he's a billionaire. This is Toto Wolff, Formula One's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of Drive to Survive. This week on Good, Bad, Billionaire, how Toto Wolff made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

20:01paralysis, other kinds of paralysis, what they've demonstrated is that with this link, they can move a robot hand. So it's picking up the signals in the brain with movement. And for someone with paralysis, they can move this robotic hand and get movement back. Now, this is quite dear to my heart because my dad is paralyzed. He had a stroke, his right side paralyzed. So this might be something that if he was to get it, would bring back right hand movement. And this is huge for people who are paralyzed across the world. This is massive, massive news. So this is a technology that's widely, that's generally known as a BCI, a brain-computer interface.

20:43But these have been around for a long while. This idea that you could put a node into the brain and it would transfer information via electronic signals. This concept's been around for a while. But what is new is the ability to make these into consumer products that actually work. And this area of science has really exploded in the last few years to the point now companies are coming to market with this sort of stuff. And we say consumer product, like it's a medical device. It's a medical device. Like you can't just go buy one. But, you know, what is the future for this sort of thing? Not yet.

21:16Yeah, it's here. Sorry, you go to the brain department. There's lots of different various ways that this technology or technologies like it can go, right? You've got movement version of the technology, which is what this Chinese chip does, which is controlling a robot using the movement signals that come from the brain. Stuff that Elon Musk with Neuralink has been talking about is much more content and actual thought. There's some kind of computer interfaces where you'd be able to use a mouse cursor using just brain motions, but the idea that you could beam content in and beam content out is much further away and much more kind of problematic in terms of what that technology could be.

22:04But they did this. Isn't there like a guy who has a Neuralink chip implanted in his brain and he can like use a computer with it? Yeah. That's a thing that's happening already, right? That's a very early pilot study. They also piloted some of the, I think, the later versions of the Neuralink in a study with monkeys where 16 out of the 23 monkeys tested died. in a pretty horrible way. But there's another story that I investigated a little while back, which was about a company called Second Sight. So that was for a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which is a degenerative disease of the eye.

22:45And it makes you go blind, essentially. And it's not a brain implant. It's a corneal implant. So it is connecting with the brain, but it is an implant into the eye that connects with the nerves that go from the eye to the brain. And that connects with a set of glasses that have a little camera in the middle of them. And that is sending signals directly from the camera into the cornea, into the nerves of the eye, into the brain. It's pretty low-res. You know, this is not immediate, high-definition sight. It's more in the realm of senses of shapes. And this guy who had been blind from childhood, he'd been fully blind for 30 years, could suddenly see again.

23:30And there was this really moving moment where he said, and I looked to the left and I saw my wife for the first time. And he just cried. But here's the problem with that, is that this was made by a Silicon Valley startup that then, after about a year of operating, went bankrupt. and suddenly there was no more support for all these people who had this implant and did he go blind again he was when we spoke to him he was like as soon as i run out of spare parts my eyesight goes again there was no company that was picking up the the ongoing tech support for these things and that's just horrifying that it is based on the whims of the free market so that was an i chip that was like a different project but now we're talking about brain chips what is it exactly like do we know what this chinese company has done differently to be able to get to a point where they're commercializing given that there have like as you said like there have been these experiments that neuralink has done where that like all the monkeys or most of the monkeys died.

24:42Like, do we understand how they're implanting these chips in a way that is more safe? So the difference here between Neuralink and this company, NEO, which is the Chinese company, is that Neuralink is proposing a chip that we've implanted inside, into the brain within gray matter tissue, which would allow it, in theory, their idea is that it can do so many more things, it can translate thoughts into words. Whereas this NeoChip is just movement. It's placed on the surface of the brain with nodes that go a little way inside of it. Motion is a part of the brain that's known quite a lot about. Whereas the verbal thought into computer interface is much more complicated and that technology is a fairly long way away.

25:35So that might explain why this one's been able to come to market faster than the Newer League. And also be safer. And also be safer. What amazes me about all this stuff, it's like, I mean, you think about this guy seeing, like getting his eyesight back for the first time in 30 years. It's this like landing on the moon level stuff, right? And when we think about like exploration, it's always about like, oh, we're going to climb this mountain. We're going to go to the bottom of the ocean. We're going to go into space. But we know so little about the inner workings of our own minds, right? I mean, like when we think about AI, there's a whole field of AI and neurology where neurologists and AI researchers are like studying both, like trying to learn more about how thought and consciousness works in the brain with the idea that if we can understand more about how the brain thinks, that'll help us unlock, you know, new ways to make a better AI and vice versa.

26:30Like really like the very like razor's edge frontiers of science. It's the last undiscovered country, really. We know more about both space and the bottom of the oceans than we do about the inner workings of the human mind. It's so wild. I mean, the other area that people talk about it being used for a lot is gaming. I could see it totally becoming widespread. I mean, certainly loads and loads of people would probably already volunteer if there was something that could fulfill that promise of total gaming immersion, the way VR promised to do but sort of never did. VR's obviously got all these problems where you're flailing around in your living room, you're smacking yourself on the door and you're not the television over.

27:10I want it to feel like I'm actually getting punched in the face, you know. I truly cannot relate to someone who would choose to get a hole drilled through their skull just for the purpose of immersing in a video game. You're clearly not a gamer, Karen. Yeah. Have you seen Candy Crush? But Nikki, I mean, there's some really, like, truly phenomenal, or I don't know, phenomenal is a word, but mind-blowing stuff happening in this world of, like, digital neurology. Can you tell us about the AI fly that they built? I've been hearing about this over the past couple of weeks. So the thing with the fly is that they took a scan of all of the neurons within a fly's brain.