Jun 26, 2019
Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning we talked about Deep Fake technology and what could happen in the future. We discussed a new technological type of aversion therapy for breaking bad habits and we talked about Google search and article theft and what Congress is doing.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 06/26/2019
Deep Fakes, Aversion Therapy and Fair Use
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Craig Peterson
Hey, Good Morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. It is getting close to July. And coming up probably about the second week of July, I'm going to be doing a little bit of an online summer course we're calling it our security summer. It will be free for anyone who wants to attend. I'm trying to do this for the people who, who can't afford to hire me and I get it. There's a lot of people out there. But it's this. It is going to be mostly a business course.
Yesterday, when I was speaking to a CEO mastermind group, there were a lot more in attendance than I had thought there would be and it went very, very well. Although it did not surprise me that they weren't entirely aware of all of the risks and what's going on. In retrospect, as I think about it, I probably should have put more positive stuff in the presentation. I tried to stress how they could lose their entire business due to their lack of awareness. Many of these are small to medium private companies, and that means it's their retirement, it's their money that's on the line. I tried to stress that they can no longer continue to coast. Anyways, this summer, we're going to teach you the things you need to know the things you need to do and how to do them. So keep an eye out for that. There's a sign up now, on my homepage at Craig Peterson dot com at the very top, you can sign up to get on my email list, you'll get my weekly show notes, and whenever anything really, bad is happening, you'll find out about it as well by email. You will also find out when I'm offering these free courses, or some of the paid ones as well, I'll let you know, believe me, I'm not hounding you.
You know, some of these internet marketers are sending an email every day forever, you know, I might send you an email every day when there's something big going on. But other than that, it just doesn't happen. It's usually a weekly email and may average out to maybe two a week if something big is happening. But hopefully, you will find my emails informative. It's not the sort of thing you can get from your smart uncle. So we are going to go now to our friends over at WGAN and, and talk a little bit with them. And we're going to talk about Google and newspapers, the big fight that's coming up, aversion therapy, and the deep fake problem is hitting Hollywood and where does this lead us ultimately, so here we go.
Matt Gagnon
And we're back 738 WGAN and Morning News with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Craig Peterson. How are you this morning, sir?
Craig Peterson
A good morning. I am doing well, Matt. I like this weather. I'm not an 80s 90s kind of guy. I love it in the 70s a beautiful, dry, day. That's my idea.
Matt Gagnon
I get the 80s and 90s as well, Craig. I love the 90s and hundreds I love it when it's 100 degrees.
Ken Altshuler
That's because you guys weren't born raised in Oklahoma, which is why
Matt Gagnon
Oh, it's a dry heat.
Ken Altshuler
It's not a dry heat.
Craig Peterson
It's crazy and not a dry heat. No, no, no, no. They get a lot of humidity. And it gets frigid in the winter. It does.
Ken Altshuler
Yeah. And by the way, Craig it has it's been 80 degrees, like twice. Where do they get humidity? Well, some irrigation, but also the Gulf? Yes, it does.
Craig Peterson
I remember I lived in pretty much northern Canada for a lot of my life. And we would get the warm, humid air would come up from the south, you know, those American clippers?
Matt Gagnon
Canada, the Arctic?
Craig Peterson
Well, yeah, I won't go quite that far. I was about halfway up to the Arctic Circle. So I remember days when the high was 30 below zero, and I was walking to school. If you
Matt Gagnon
Don't mind me asking, but why would anybody live there on purpose?
Craig Peterson
Well, it's not that bad, you get used to it. I guess it's not that I would rather have it be cold than hot. When it's cold, you can always put on another layer of clothes,
Matt Gagnon
Lots of clothing that you have to put on when the high was minus 30.
Craig Peterson
Well, I had a parka. I'd wear the parka. It had a hood on your head. It goes in front of your face, and it goes out to a little tube that's maybe about six inches wide that you kind of look through and breathe out of so that you don't get frostbite on your face or your nose or anything.
Matt Gagnon
What a fantastic way to live, Craig.
Craig Peterson
In the summer, we'd get to 75 degrees, and it'd be just absolutely beautiful. You go to the Calgary Stampede,
Matt Gagnon
Which I did too, by the way.
Craig Peterson
Yeah, I haven't been there since the 70 something I've been there since the 70s. But yeah, it's, you know, it's different. And I've been watching this Ice Plane show where they fly these old DC three and four planes from World War Two. They're flying around up there in the Canadian Arctic. It brought back memories, and I thought you know, it isn't so bad. It's a problem. Maybe what happens can is you kind of get gas-lit you don't know any better.
Matt Gagnon
By the way, why are deep fakes not a laughing matter? I'm curious.
Craig Peterson
Here's what's been going on you guys. I think even talked about that Nancy Pelosi video right? Where she was slurring her speech, and go, you know, drunk and everything a little different, though. That's not it. That's da that was a manipulated video where they slowed her down and cut it a little bit. But actually, it's a fake. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people have heard about that one. Well, there's a few more that are out there. Right now. You've got one with our friend Mark Zuckerberg saying whoever controls the data controls the future. Right? That one's a real deep fake because they modeled a face on to him and and and like made it into, like, what a deep fake is.
Matt Gagnon
It's like basically taking an actor and having you map their facial stuff to somebody else speaking and using porn quite a bit.
Craig Peterson
So I have no first-hand knowledge. Yeah, well, that's Photoshop, you know, most of the time, where and people are familiar with this, right? You'll take a picture, and you manipulate it. And some of these models out there say no, I don't want you to do fake me, you know, because it makes women feel inadequate. And yeah, I get that. And also the You see, all of a sudden, wait a minute, they have dimples on their legs, and maybe they're Pfizer a little sicker than you thought they were. So we've had those for a while. No,
Ken Altshuler
No, no, I hate to disagree with you on that one, Craig. But what he's referring to is the deep fake thing in pornography. Like they're putting like Taylor Swift on regular porn, a porn actress. And I've seen this and making it into the because these facial mapping technologies come so far now that and it's so cheap.
Craig Peterson
Absolutely. Well, I'm glad you guys are well familiar with porn. I've only seen them in pictures for models. Now you can go online to YouTube. And you can see Game of Thrones actor who played, of course, Jon Snow, his name's Kevin Harrington, on there apologizing about all of these problems and mistakes in season eight of Game of Thrones. What they're doing is what Matt was saying. They take my mapping of your face and the mapping. Simple, right? It isn't like Lord of the Rings, where they had golf balls all over the guy that was playing that character Golem. Then they had to computers and spent over 100 million dollars spent in the development of the software over to make Gollum on screen. What we're talking about is what you can do right now today with some free software and do it on just a regular computer. And basically, you can make anyone say anything? I think that might be what's happening with some of those supposed tweets that are coming from our president?
Matt Gagnon
Do you think they might?
Ken Altshuler
I would say not because he's known to say things like that.
Craig Peterson
Here's the problem now, right? If he's known to say things like that, and you can't trust this technology anymore, and we have deep fakes and let's say President Trump is saying things like the bombs are going to start dropping in 15 minutes, which is basically what President Ronald Reagan said years ago. How is someone like Iran going to know whether or not this is a deep fake? And there's been a lot of work going on on this because it has become such a problem on the government on the military side, and they're spending money now to try and figure out how they can tell us deep fake. We've got people in universities right now, doing just that. In one university, they created a couple of neural networks. In other words, artificial intelligence machines, they had one machine making deep fakes. And they had another machine analyzing them to see if something was a deep fake. They were sharing back and forth. They got good at making deep fakes, where you want your video, and it, you can even change the head movement and everything else in the video, it isn't just like stick a head on top of an actress of Taylor Swift face on top of an actress. They can now manipulate what they're doing where the moving and make it look exactly like that person unless you look very closely, you can't tell. And when I say closely I mean, you can go in and examine it pixel by pixel. So we've got some potential problems here. We could have Russia, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, go ahead and create a deep fake of our president or someone else threatening war. And this, this could get very dangerous very quickly.
Matt Gagnon
We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays to discuss the world of technology. So, Craig, I have a nasty Mountain Dew habit, if I wanted to kick my Mountain Dew habit, should I be shocking myself as though I'm in some medieval shock therapy? Is this Pavlovian to the extreme? What is this idea that, that I've heard about where you would shock yourself into the kicking horrible habits?
Craig Peterson
Well, this is about the Pavlock bracelet. We've known about aversion therapy for a long time, and I've used it myself. Have you ever taken a rubber band, put it on your wrist when you're trying to break a habit? You snap it when tempted, or a particular thought comes around? Whether its food or your mountain dew? Do you guys have bad habits?
Ken Altshuler
I have no bad, I don't hate myself.
Craig Peterson
It's a fairly common thing. And the idea is, you want to train your brain, that when you're thinking about having that smoke or when you're thinking about eating that food, whatever it might be, that chocolate cake, you snap yourself on the wrist using the rubber band, and it does work to a degree.
Well, there's now a company out there that has an aversion therapy bracelet. It's called pavlok. Spelled pa-v-L-ok. It has a lightning bolt button on the front of it. When you hit the lightning bolt button, and it sends a shock right into your wrist. And the idea is that every time you think about that something, or you start making a particular bad habit, whatever it might be, you shock yourself to help you change your habit. Why? Your brain is going to associate it, the action or the thought instead of associated with pleasure is going to be associated with pain, and you will do it less. It is just a theory, but aversion therapy has worked for many years in the past. For those who don't have much self-discipline, you can have your friend, your spouse installs the Pavlok app up onto their smartphone and can use it as a remote control to shock you as you're wearing the bracelet. So you know self-control? I don't know. So if your spouse can, if she gives you a Pavlok, you might not want to because she can trigger the 350-volt shock. I think it's worth shot for some. I was going to say shock. But that would be just too bad. If I was morbidly obese and I wanted to quit eating this costs 200 bucks so isn't exactly cheap. But it's probably worth doing. And I certainly would try it. But it's kind of neat, man. I think this is a decent idea.
Ken Altshuler
Craig Peterson, he's our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738. So is Google stealing the News from the New York Times?
Craig Peterson
Oh, man, this thing keeps hitting the News. Because this week, what's happening is they were talking more about this. And here's what's going on the News Media Alliance is going after Google accusing them of stealing the News. If you do Google search, it'll come up, and it will give you results. And some of those results will be swiped directly from websites as well as news sites. And if you go to News, Google com, it's even worse because it's all swiped from news sites. The big question, of course, comes under fair use. Is it fair use for Google to grab a few sentences from it, and put it up on their website. The New York Times and other news sources, which include local newspapers have said that this is wrong. And it costs them billions of dollars. Because if you add it all up, more than half of the local newspapers have gone out of business, just this look right here in Portland, look anywhere release so much of the US now do not there aren't local papers anymore. So Congress is currently involved. And there is a real bipartisan bill that has been starting to move. There's one in the house, one in the Senate, where they are trying to carve out an exemption to the antitrust laws for newspapers for four years. And the idea is that they can now collude to try and figure out what kind of a business model works. The reason for this is they don't want the local newspapers to be going out of business. It is the whole right to free speech, which is getting squashed on every side, you look is being hurt by this lack of local newspapers. Maybe they can come up with something that would work. I know, personally, if I could pay 10 or 20 bucks a month, just like I do for streaming music, I would buy one subscription and get all of the newspapers that I want to get right. But I'm not going to pay 10 bucks to New York Times, Washington Post, and you know, all of these guys, as it would end up costing 50 to a hundred bucks a month. On top of that, I have to track all my subscriptions and everything. It's just too complicated. So we'll see what happens here. We've even got a very conservative Senator Kennedy from Louisiana, who was sponsoring this in the Senate. So we'll see where this goes. But I know I don't say this very often. But I can sympathize with a great lady in this case. Hmm,
Matt Gagnon
That is a first. All right. Well, Craig Peterson happens to be our tech guru. And he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over all the things in the world of technology. Craig, today is no exception. Thanks so much for joining the program. And we will talk to you again.
Craig Peterson
Next week. Gentlemen, thanks.
Ken Altshuler
Thanks a lot, Craig. All right, coming up at eight. Oh,
Craig Peterson
Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening. If you have not already, make sure you subscribe. It helps us out. It gets us on more lists. And that gets the message out to more people. I want to reach more people. I want to help stop some of the nastiness that's going on. That's why I do so much volunteer work. Anyhow, uh, thanks for being with us. I appreciate you guys listening. Take care. Talk to you tomorrow. Well, I guess I won't talk to you till Saturday. Bye-bye.
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