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In researching AI consultants, I got here throughout a deepfake. It wasn’t apparent at first, given his seemingly legit profile and engagement on social networks. But after seeing the identical creepy AI-generated picture of Dr. Lance B. Eliot all around the net, it was clear that he wasn’t an actual individual. So I adopted him and discovered his grift.
The ever-present Dr. Lance B. Eliot
Eliot has over 11,000 followers on LinkedIn and we now have two connections in frequent. Each have 1000’s of LinkedIn followers and many years of expertise in AI with roles spanning investor, analyst, keynote, columnist and CEO. LinkedIn members have interaction with Eliot although all his posts are repetitive thread-jacking that result in his many Forbes articles.
On Forbes, Eliot publishes each one to a few days with almost equivalent headlines. After studying a number of articles, it’s apparent the content material is AI-generated tech jargon. One of many greatest points with Eliot’s intensive Forbes portfolio is that the positioning limits readers to 5 free tales a month till they’re directed to buy a $6.99-a-month or $74.99-a-year subscription. This will get sophisticated now that Forbes has formally put itself up on the market with a price ticket within the neighborhood of $800 million.
Eliot’s content material can be accessible behind a Medium paywall, which costs $5 a month. And a skinny profile of Eliot seems in Cision, Muckrack and the Sam Whitmore Media Survey, paid media companies which are costly and relied upon by a overwhelming majority of PR professionals.
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Then there’s the sale of Eliot’s books on-line. He sells them via Amazon, fetching somewhat over $4 per title although Walmart presents them for much less. On Thriftbooks, Eliot’s pearls of knowledge promote for round $27, which is a deal in comparison with the $28 price ticket on Porchlight. A protected wager is that e-book gross sales are pushed by faux opinions. But a number of disillusioned people bought the books and gave them low scores, calling out the content material for being repetitive.
The injury to large manufacturers and particular person identities
After clicking a hyperlink to Eliot’s Stanford College profile, I used one other browser and landed on the true Stanford web site, the place a search on Eliot produced zero outcomes. A side-by-side comparability exhibits the branded colour pink on Eliot’s Stanford web page was not the identical shade because the genuine web page.
The same expertise occurred on Cornell’s ArXiv web site. With only a slight tweak to the Cornell brand, certainly one of Eliot’s educational papers was posted, stuffed with typos and extra low-quality AI-generated content material introduced in a typical educational analysis paper format. The paper cited an intensive record of sources, together with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who apparently revealed in an 1897 version of the Harvard Regulation Evaluation — three years after he died.
These not all in favour of studying Eliot’s content material could make their technique to his podcasts, the place a bot spouts meaningless lingo. An excerpt from one listener’s assessment reads, “Should you like listening to somebody learn phrase for phrase from a script of paper, it is a nice podcast for you.”
The URL posted subsequent to Eliot’s podcasts promotes his web site about self-driving automobiles, which initially led to a useless finish. A refresh on the identical hyperlink led to Techbrium, certainly one of Eliot’s faux employer web sites.
It’s wonderful how Eliot is ready to do all of this and nonetheless carve out time to talk at government management summits organized by HMG Technique. The faux occasions characteristic big-name tech corporations listed as companions, with a who’s who of advisors and actual bios of executives from Zoom, Adobe, SAP, ServiceNow and the Boston Crimson Sox, amongst others.
Attendance at HMG occasions is free for senior know-how executives, supplied they register. In keeping with HMG’s phrases and situations, “If for some cause you might be unable to attend, and unable to ship a direct report in your stead, a no-show payment of $100 shall be charged to cowl prices of meals and repair workers.”
The price of ignoring deepfakes
A deeper dig into Eliot led to a two-year-old Reddit thread calling him out and rapidly veering into hard-to-follow conspiracy theories. Eliot is probably not an anagram or tied to the NSA, however he’s one of many hundreds of thousands of deepfakes earning money on-line which are getting more durable to identify.
Wanting on the monetary ripple results of deepfakes raises questions on who’s accountable after they generate income for themselves and their companions. That’s to not point out the price of downloading malware, concentrating on faux prospects and paying for spammy affiliate internet marketing hyperlinks.
Arguably, a eager eye can spot a deepfake from the fuzzy or lacking background, unusual hair, odd-set eyes, and robotic voices that don’t sync with their mouths. But when this had been a common fact, the price of deepfakes wouldn’t be billions in losses as they generate monetary scams and impersonate actual folks.
AI has not solved all the problems that make it laborious to identify a deepfake’s lack of authenticity, however is actively fixing them. It’s the sort of outing-the-deepfakes article that helps AI study and enhance. This leaves the duty of recognizing deepfakes to people, forcing them to be vigilant about who they let into their networks and lives.
Kathy Keating is an actual individual and founding father of ProsInComms, a PR consultancy.
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