• Sports betting platform FanDuel is using deepfake technology to bring a former NBA player back to his prime in anticipation of the NBA playoffs, according to a press release.
• The “Think Like a Player” campaign features a deepfake-generated version of Charles Barkley from the 1990s, when he was at the height of his ability. “Young Chuck” will encourage FanDuel customers to “think like a player” when placing their bets.
• The spots will air during the play-in tournament and throughout the conference finals, with the final ad going live during finals, and accompany a special sign-up offer to encourage betting during the playoffs.

… A better solution is Zero Trust Information. [Y]oung people are by-and-large appropriately skeptical of what they read online; what they need are trusted resources that do their best to get things right and, critically, take accountability and explain themselves when they change their mind. That is the only way to harvest the massive benefits of the “information superhighway” that is the Internet while avoiding roads to nowhere, or worse.

A similar principle is the way forward for content as well: one can make the case that most of the Internet, given the zero marginal cost of distribution, ought already be considered fake; once content creation itself is a zero marginal cost activity almost all of it will be. The solution isn’t to try to eliminate that content, but rather to find ways to verify that which is still authentic. As I noted above I expect Spotify to do just that with regards to music: now the value of the service won’t simply be convenience, but also the knowledge that if a song on Spotify is labeled “Drake” it will in fact be by Drake (or licensed by him!). Read More

As the U.S. deals with a nationwide swatting wave, Motherboard has traced much of the activity to a particular swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram. Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations.

“Hello, I just committed a crime and I want to confess,” a panicked sounding man said in a call to a police department in February. “I’ve placed explosives inside a local school,’ the man continued.

… The bombs weren’t real. But, crucially, neither was the man’s voice. The panicked man’s lines sound artificially generated, according to recordings of the swatting calls reviewed by Motherboard.  Read More

AI company Optic has launched AI or Not, a web service that attempts to identify whether an image was generated by AI. The company says its focus is on detecting risks in “AI-generated media, NSFW and NFT counterfeit in real-time.” Read More

#fake

• A woman asked me to do a story about the mastectomy tattoo she got after having cancer.
• After a few introductory emails, I realized the text and photo she’d sent were AI-generated.
• I caught on early, but experts say that as the tech improves, more journalists could be fooled

Microsoft’s Bing said Google’s Bard had been shut down after it misread a story citing a tweet sourced from a joke. It’s not a good sign for the future of online misinformation.

If you don’t believe the rushed launch of AI chatbots by Big Tech has an extremely strong chance of degrading the web’s information ecosystem, consider the following:

Right now,* if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event. Read More

“I suspect it was pushing my luck when I did the [Twitter] thread,” Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins said.

Prosecutors in New York are thought to be on the brink of filing an indictment against Donald Trump over a hush money payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels. It would mark the first time in US history that a president, past or present, would face criminal charges.

Many are envisioning — some gleefully — what a Trump arrest would look like. Among them is Eliot Higgins, best known as the founder of open-source investigative journalism website Bellingcat. This week, Higgins used the AI image generator Midjourney to depict Trump’s arrest. He shared 50 images on Twitter, and they quickly went viral.  Read More