The Other AI Arms Race: "Defender" AI vs Deepfakes - Reality Defender CEO Ben Colman

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Just when you thought it could not get harder to recognize truth in your newsfeed, along comes artificial intelligence. Now it’s child’s play for bad actors to create fake news, fake videos, fake pornography at digital scale and in quality all but impossible to detect. As deepfakes multiply, reality itself becomes just one of several options your algorithm can serve, and not necessarily the most convincing one. 

Our guest today leads a company that offers an intriguing defense to this dystopia. Ben Colman is CEO of Reality Defender, whose technology exposes deepfakes in real-time across voice, images and text. I’ve seen the demo, and it’s impressive. 

Ben’s background is in cybersecurity. We’ve seen this in other disinformation fighting technologies: Cybersecurity is a logical foundation in many ways for information security. 

Ben and Eric cover some chilling real-world examples of deepfakes, Ben explains how Reality Defender’s technology works, and why usability is critical to scaling truth’s defenses. They’ll also discuss whether deepfake detection could strengthen trust in traditional media. 

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com