Voice Clone Extortion and the Rise of WaterTok with Jen Campbell and Jag Sharma - Episode 44
Your voice is no longer uniquely your own.
With AI at the centre of two controversies this past fortnight - voice clones and fake photography - it’s clear that we’re seeing new uses for technology at a rate beyond which we can hope to keep up.
Meanwhile in the tech world, social media trends have transformed the approach to drinking water, and Twitter’s ‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’ is confusing many.
Here to make sense of all this, and consider where it’s all going, are the wonderful Jen Campbell and Jag Sharma on this week’s Disconnected podcast.
This episode of Disconnected covers:
The remarkable growth of the WaterTok trend
Twitter’s ‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’ approach to hate on the platform
Sony World Photography Awards being duped by AI
Voice clones being used for extortion
Episode Highlights:
“#WaterTok has reached over 103m views on TikTok, and the idea is that it’s going to make you drink more water by creating flavoured and sweetened water recipes.” - 1:40 - Jen Campbell
“When Elon took over Twitter, he made a point of not shadow banning people. So what’s ‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’ all about?” - 10:30 - Jen Campbell
“Should everything that is offensive to some be completely banned for all. But then we all have different things that we might get offended about or not.” - 13:25 - Jag Sharma
“The winner of a Sony photography award has refused his prize after revealing that his work was an AI creation. Are we getting so far now with AI that it can dupe us all?” - 17:20 - Jag Sharma
“I do believe there's a strong use case for creating these AI images especially in my line of work. I think when it comes down to photography, that's somebody's craft, it's a skill that not everybody has, so I do think you have to be very careful about using it in those instances.” - 22:20 - Jen Campbell
“The scariness of how voice tech could be used - the actual app used to try and extort a family was one quick Google search away.” - 25:15 - Jag Sharma
Links & references:
Jen Campbell:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-m-campbell/
Jag Sharma: