On with Kara Swisher: Deepfake abuse panel, featuring Laurie Segall

**Laurie Segall** (0:01)
Hi, Mostly Human listeners, it's Laurie Segall. Today, I have a treat for you. I'm sharing an episode of Kara Swisher's podcast, On with Kara Swisher. In it, Kara hosts a panel of deepfake experts, including me, to discuss the threat, the current scope and the future of sexually explicit deepfake abuse. Now, if you've been listening to our four-part series, Searching for Mr. Deepfakes, this is a perfect cap. If you're new to the subject, it's a fantastic primer. Hope you enjoy.

**Kara Swisher** (0:32)
Hey, folks. A word of warning before we begin. Today's episode discusses sexual violence, including rape, graphic sexual content, and suicide. So you might want to keep this in mind when you decide if and where to listen.
Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guests today are attorney Carrie Goldberg, tech journalist and CEO of Mostly Human Media, Laurie Segall, and VS. Subrahmanian, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. We're talking about non-consensual deepfake pornography, or AI-generated explicit videos and images that use real people's likenesses without their consent. Celebrities were often the target of early pornographic deepfakes. Now, according to one survey, one in 18s personally knows someone who has been targeted. Nearly all deepfake porn depicts women. Despite laws and moderation efforts, pornographic deepfake websites and so-called Nudify apps continue to multiply.
And a recent analysis from Wired found that Elon Musk's Scrock chatbot is still being used to generate and host non-consensual deepfakes. I am not surprised in the least. Carrie Goldberg is a victim's rights attorney. Her law firm specializes in fighting internet abuse and revenge porn. Journalist Laurie Segall recently released Searching for Mr. Deepfakes, an investigative docu-series created for TikTok in partnership with Paris Hilton. It follows an investigation to unmask the anonymous operator behind one of the internet's most notorious deepfake porn platforms.
VS. Subrahmanian is a top computer scientist and deepfake expert. He led the team that developed the global online deepfake detection system, a free platform to help journalists detect deepfakes. I think it's critically important to talk about this issue. When I started my career, pornography was at the heart of the problems with the early internet, and the uses of it and the abuse of it was built into the system at the start. A lot of people were aware of it then and have had a very hard time dealing with it, even as technology has gotten better and better at being more and more abusive. So it's critical that we keep talking about it, we criminalize this, and we start to hold platforms, big platforms, responsible for the stuff that they distribute. Our expert question today comes from Wall Street Journal tech reporter, Georgia Wells. This is an important conversation and one we will keep having, so stick around. And one more thing before we get started, if you're going to be in Washington, DC on July 16th, please join us live at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center for a taping of On. I'll be talking to Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary under President Biden and former Rhode Island Governor, about what AI means for the American workforce. And as a special bonus, before that conversation, I'll be speaking with Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels and the University of Notre Dame President, Father Robert Dowd, about how universities are approaching AI and workforce issues. You can get tickets and learn more at voxmedia.com/karaswisherlive.
Carrie, Laurie and VS., thanks for coming on On.

**Laurie Segall** (4:04)
Good to be here.

**V.S. Subrahmanian** (4:05)
Thrilled to be here.

**Kara Swisher** (4:06)
Hello, hello. So I talked to experts back in January about the proliferation of sexualized, non-consensual AI deepfakes, including images of children on Elon Musk X that were generated by its Grok chatbot. Obviously AI created deepfake porn, hasn't gone away on Grok or elsewhere, and the technology continues to improve. I'd like each of you to explain the current scope of the problem and how pervasive it is, and who it's affecting, and how technically advanced it is. We're going to get more into detail, so go high level here. Carrie, we'll start with you, then Laurie, then VS.

**Carrie Goldberg** (4:42)
So I'm a plaintiff's attorney that sues tech companies, and generally I see problems at the very early stages. So back probably seven years ago, we started getting situations where celebrities and really high-level content creators were being deepfaked, and then over the last just I'd say year or so, it started trickling down to middle schoolers getting deepfaked. But all the apps involved were these pretty obscure things, but then everything totally changed when Elon started sending around pictures of toasters in bikinis and it just unleashed this never-before-seen situation where everyone was able to create fakes and then immediately publish them on the X platform.