About this keynote
Firstly, I’d like to thank Chad, Microsoft’s European CTO for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Co-Pilot, for inviting me to be the opening keynote speaker at this year’s closed doors event in Geneva, Switzerland, where a small but very select group of Microsoft clients came together to explore the future of AI, and more specifically Deepfakes, dis and misinformation, and Synthetic Content.
Having tracked this space now for over a decade now, and as one of the first people to identify the Generative AI and Deepfake trend back in 2016, and then having written a book on it all in 2019 three years before ChatGPT rose to fame and the topic became top of mind for everyone, this was an easy topic for me to cover.
During the twenty minute session, which was then followed by an hours long fireside chat, I walked through some of the fundamentals of the trend, such as the cost, resources, and skill needed to create authentic looking, high quality, fake content all dropping to zero, something which means that in the coming years the only thing holding back the flood of Deepfakes and malicious synthetic content will be the detection tools that giants like Microsoft are developing.
I also discussed the important difference between Deepfake content, which is largely original content that is manipulated and changed using AI, and Synthetic Content where AI generates the content, whatever that content is, whether it’s audio, images, VFX, video, text, Virtual Reality assets, and so forth, from scratch. And, this difference is important for people to get their heads around since the two methods have distinctly unique downsides and upsides, characteristics, and ecosystems.
Then, having gone through all of the above, with examples, I zeroed in on how ultimately, from a disinformation perspective at least, I don’t believe we will ever be able to catch all of the AI generated or manipulated content, even with the best tools, something that I demonstrated in front of the audience as I used different simple techniques to evade Microsoft’s cutting edge AI deepfake detection tools. Which then, from a societal perspective, means that from here on in, in my opinion at least, we should not believe anything behind a glass screen.
