Presented as part of The Ethics Centre’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, supported by UNSW Sydney.
Transcript
It was the inspiration for George Orwell for his ministries in his prophetic novel 1984. There were four ministries, but the most important, because it was trying to control how people think, was the Ministry of Truth. Now, of course, the Ministry of Truth was not about truth. In that language of Orwellian doublespeak, the Ministry of Truth was all about untruth. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Now, the Ministry of Truth is about to be replaced by the Ministry of AI.
Much of the content that you’re starting to read is generated by machines, it’s synthetic. We’re starting to be inundated by a tsunami of deepfakes and synthetic content.
We’re not going to be able to hear the human voices in the sea of machine-generated content. Now, it’s not that the machines are saying untruths, because to be able to say an untruth, you’d have to know what was true or false, and the machines have no idea what is true or false.
…AI image generators that can make you funny mimetic pictures of the Pope in a white puffer jacket. But we’re soon going to be in a world in which everything you see, read, and hear could potentially be false. What sort of world is that going to be? I mean, the good news is I imagine social media is just going to be just so full of this stuff that we finally realize that social media is not the place to find news.
It’s the place to be entertained. And you can’t believe anything that you read there. But the problem is that this is going to wash over to everything else. It’s going to wash over to the whole of the Internet, to all of the media, to all of the discourse in all of our lives. And that tsunami is going to wash right through our society.
Now, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that there’s some technology coming along to help fix that. Digital watermarks. When you go to watch or see or listen to any content, there’ll be a little digital watermark to verify the veracity of what you’ve seen. And those digital watermarks will record any edits that have been done to that content. So, when you see a photograph or a video or an audio, there’ll be a little checkmark to say, this is going to be embedded into the fabric of the Internet. All of your device, in fact, is going to be built into the hardware so you can’t, so people are going to have very little difficulty to hack with it.
In fact, we’ve done this before. When industry realized that we were going to use the Internet for banking and commerce, they realized that we had to be able to trust the websites that we go to. And so, they started building this trust infrastructure of digital certificates so that when you go to your bank’s website, it is your bank’s website and not someone trying to spoof you.
And so, we’re going to start, and indeed already industries already started, to build that sort of digital watermark structure for us so that we can actually trust the content, the text, the video, the audio that we’re seeing online. In fact, I have other good news for you. We finally found the perfect application for the blockchain. It’s not crypto scam, it’s to do digital watermarks. You want a distributed immutable ledger on which to record the provenance of the data that you’re looking at. And that is the beautiful idea in the blockchain.
It’s a distributed immutable ledger on which to record transactions. So that’s the good news. Unfortunately, there’s bad news.
It’s going to take a while for us to build this infrastructure. I mean, for a start, you’ve all got to, I’m afraid to tell you, you’ve all got to go out and buy new mobile phones that have this built into the hardware of the device. And so, we’re going to be in a very dangerous world. You’re in the right place. This is the festival of dangerous ideas. For the next decade or so, it’s going to be a world in which truth is very scarce. And unfortunately, it’s already a world in which truth is pretty scarce, pretty contested idea.
