A deep fake video — made by artificial intelligence — recently circulated online, showing a fake President Biden announcing a U.S. draft for the war in Ukraine. The quality of the deep fake video isn’t THAT spectacular (you’ve probably seen more convincing ones), but it could still fool some Americans, Glenn says, especially those not paying attention to how AI is changing the world. Glenn and Stu discuss the video, plus they discuss how AI and deep fake videos potentially could cause HUGE CHAOS in the upcoming, 2024 presidential campaign season...

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

STU: I feel like I'm being sucked into something here.

GLENN: You're actually not. This is not --

STU: This is not a trap? It's always a trap.

GLENN: It's not a trap. Honestly, you got something pretty significant right.

Because you asked me, is this the time -- you feel like this is the time we're going to see a deepfake, that could affect things.

STU: Oh, yeah. When we talked about the election, in that context.

GLENN: Yeah. And I said, I think so. But maybe not. Didn't I?

STU: Yeah. And you weren't sure that it would happen. But it seems like you were on that directive. Well, it seems like there was a deepfake out there. And it's not necessarily affecting the election.

This isn't a good deepfake. But it came out yesterday. And it was making the rounds.

And it scared a lot of people. Here it is, cut three.

VOICE: The illegal Russian offensive has been swift, callous, and brutal. It's barbaric. Putin's illegal occupation of Kyiv and the impending Chinese blockade of Taiwan, has created a two-front national security crisis, that requires more troops than the volunteer military can supply. I have received guidance from General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that the recommended way forward, will be to invoke the Selective Service Act, as is my authority as president.

The first to be called in a sequence determined by national lottery will be men and women whose 20th birthday falls during the calendar year 2023.

Remember, you're not sending your sons and daughters to war. You are sending them to freedom.
God bless our troops, and God bless Ukraine.

STU: I mean, you're right. That's not even a good.

GLENN: No. Not a good one. And it's still convincing enough.

The only thing that is really wrong with this, is the mouth is not synced exactly. But more importantly, it's too fast. This is based on him, you know, five years ago.

STU: Yeah. Right. He said all the words in the right order. That's the only thing that stuck out.

GLENN: Really, that is. If he would have sounded more like today. And it would have been slower. And you have to go out.

STU: And he threw in a banana's foster reference in the middle or something.

GLENN: My pop used to tell me all the time. Son, you're not going to war. Send somebody else.
(laughter)

GLENN: Then it would have been believable. But this is the kind of thing that is going to happen.

This is the kind of thing that's going to happen. And it's going to be most likely from a foreign source.

STU: Although, it could also come from -- I mean, I don't think American political operatives are above it either.

GLENN: No.

STU: Now --

GLENN: On any side. On any side.

STU: Let me take your temperature on this. Because I know you read a lot about this stuff. And really been on the AI stuff. Mostly by anybody that I know.

My guess is, a speech like that, which if you're listening on radio, you're not seeing this. But it's a flags behind Joe Biden official speech. We're going to war. We're calling up troops.

Is less likely to be the thing, that would affect an election in 2024, as -- as let's say, an off-mic moment. You know, if you remember the -- remember the Mitt Romney 2012 oh, you know, 47 percent of people don't even pay taxes. They don't care.

First of all, that statistic seemed completely right. And why it was controversial, I don't know. But it was -- you couldn't even see his face. In the video clip of that.

GLENN: Correct.

STU: It was just him, kind of a side profile. You couldn't really make out what he was saying. And you heard his voice. Something like that. That was convincing. Where you could see his --

GLENN: Oh, absolutely. I could see something like that coming out about Ron DeSantis.

STU: Yeah. Especially someone like that. The governor of Florida. He's well-known. You know, five years ago, you throw a clip of him. They caught him saying this. You know, I think 80 percent of the left would believe it immediately.

GLENN: Immediately.

STU: Whether it would look good or not.

GLENN: And it would go around and around and around.

And even when it's debunked. It would still leave a taint. It would be enough to change an election, through just a few like five percentage points. You know what I mean?

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: That is -- that's really true.

But this kind of stuff also is very dangerous.

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: Because this would be targeting people whose 20th birthday is in the year 23. Which is right now.

Those are not necessarily the ones watching what's going on.

STU: Correct.

GLENN: So that thing circles around.

They don't necessarily know that -- that's the president. Did you see this? I don't watch the news. Somebody just sent this to me. Did you see this?

That's the stuff -- you know, and it -- we're at the very, very, very beginning of this.

STU: I think we've -- we've certainly talked about this.

And done it many times, in conversation over the years.

Of war of the worlds.

And one of the things that's fascinating about war of the worlds.

I don't know. You get highfalutin. How do people believe this?

They're listening to a radio broadcast. An alien invasion. How do they buy this?

Then here we are. Now, look, these deepfakes, look a lot -- maybe more convincing. Maybe it's aliens.

GLENN: War of the worlds was really -- it sounded absolutely real.

STU: Yeah. Although, it was at a time of radio dramas. Which is part of the reason why you think, why did they believe this?

GLENN: But it was also playing on American's innocence. Nobody had ever done that before.

STU: And here we are. No one has ever done this either.

And, you know, we talked about these filters a little bit yesterday.

These TikTok filters, where they're taking people who are moderate to ugly, and turning them into models in realtime. They look perfect. They look like they are on the cover of a magazine.

GLENN: So dangerous.

STU: You know, we're just getting there -- that's a consumer level product, that you can apply, on an app, for free. Right?

What do foreign governments have? What do spy agencies have?

What do political operatives that can raise a million dollars' worth of a crappy email, what do they have?

And the way we've always disassembled this in the past. Have been through institutions. Trustworthy people, who you can trust to look at the evidence, and come back to you with the right answer. We no longer have those institutions.

GLENN: Because they don't -- they refuse to do the things that lead to trust.

STU: Yep.

GLENN: I mean, one of the things -- look, I don't ever ask you for your trust. And I think the vast majority of this audience, finds me to be truthful.

And finds me to at least, if I'm saying it, you know that I at least believe it to be true.

STU: It's a require quality, at times, in this country.

GLENN: In this country.

However, it's not because -- well, I think part of it is because, well, crap. He's right.

But I think the majority of that comes from -- because it's trust is like faith. You -- you take it, you trust me?

You trust me?

You say that, when you're going to go jump off a ledge. Do you trust me?

Not really.

Okay?

That's trust is something that you need, when you don't know the facts.

And that doesn't come from necessarily being right all the time. Because you could be wrong. And I am wrong a lot of the times. But I will tell you when I'm wrong.

You don't have to hear it from a bunch of other people going, you know, he didn't get this right. He didn't get that right. Yeah. I know.

I lead with my mistakes.

If I've made a mistake -- now, there's a difference between being wrong on a theory and being wrong on a fact.

If I'm wrong on a fact, I will immediately correct it. It bothers me.

But I also do that because that's what I would want someone to do in my life. Look, I don't care if you get things wrong. I don't care if you made a mistake. We all do.

I've said stupid stuff. I've done stupid things. I've been wrong. So you just apologize for it. And you admit it. And you you're like, I'm sorry. I'm really working on this. I'm sorry.

We tried to do our best. And whenever we get it wrong, Stu you can verify. We have meetings every day. I think we got something wrong the other day. Half our meeting was, how did this happen? How did we stop it from happening again?

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: And we strive for that. The media. All they have to do. Imagine how much credibility they would have. Let's take Hunter Biden.

If they said, look, Hunter Biden laptop thing. We had -- we had news from the government, that this was misinformation.

And, you know what, it really -- we thought we were doing the right thing. But it kind of pisses me off right now. Because it looks like they might have been lying to us. We're turning over all the information. We're going through it ourself. And we've got investigative reporters on to find out, did they know they were lying to us? And let the chips fall where they may.

If they weren't lying to us. Well, then we can all say, we were all trying to do the best for the election. And in this case, we were wrong. Because now we look at it, and we know it's not a Russian hoax.

And this is something that America needs to know about.

STU: It's important to amend that. And say, we blew it on that. We tried.

This was our reasoning. And look, the reasoning is at some level, coherent. Right?

If ten days before the election, Donald Trump Jr's laptop was found -- now, Donald Trump Jr isn't doing crack all the time. So this probably wouldn't happen. It was found in a computer repair shop, and we started seeing pictures of Donald Trump Jr with hookers and prostitutes. We -- us on the right would be very skeptical, particularly if it came from --

GLENN: Gloria Allred.

STU: Gloria Allred. Right?

We would, of course, be skeptical of that.

However, it would be on us, despite our skepticism, to look at the evidence and see if that was real or not. That's not always easy to do. The media refused to do it. Because number one, I think they legitimately didn't believe it initially.

I think they really were skeptical. And number two, they didn't care if it was right or not because they wanted Donald Trump out of office so badly.

GLENN: And that's the problem.

You can say -- you can even come out and say, we made a mistake. We were so driven by our blind hatred for Donald Trump, that we didn't want it to be true. So we didn't really look into it.

And we apologize for that. And we're working on that.

STU: Here's what we're doing.

GLENN: Here's some things we'll put in place, so that doesn't happen again.

But we know now that it is true.

And we're going to lead the investigation on it.

We want you to know, that we know that we were wrong.

And we want to do right. And we are somebody to be trusted. So we're going to go and turn over every single stone.

You may not get the conservatives to go with you. You may get 5 percent of conservatives to go, okay.

And if you lived by that and did that a few times, you would get more and more conservatives. But I bet you would get 55 of the independents who don't trust you now.

You would get a lot of people over time, and you would fix the thing that's killing you.

But they just -- see, it's like chemotherapy. Except, it's better than chemotherapy.

You think it's poison. But it actually isn't poison. Unless you misuse it.

Unless you do it too much.

Unless you've got a hack. But you look at that, as poison.

I can't admit that I'm wrong. That will destroy my credibility. No. It's not.

It's the cure.

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: It's the cure.

STU: Admitting it would go so far.

GLENN: Oh, it would.

STU: I think -- honestly, from a cynical sense. It would bail you out of a lot of other mistakes/spin/lies.

GLENN: Oh, my gosh.

STU: You know, if you came out and just admitted the obvious ones. Obviously, we were wrong about the COVID-19 lab leak. And saying it was a conspiracy theory. And wanting everyone banned off social media for it.

Obviously that was wrong. Obviously the Hunter Biden thing was true. We blew it. Here's how we blew it. Here's how we're going to fix it in the future.

You know what, maybe we'll hire a couple of actual conservatives. So when we have these narratives, they can call us on it. And we will give them the ombudsman role where they can write columns saying, this is why my paper got this wrong this time. And we're not going do edit it. And we're not going to stop them. We're going to allow them to do it, even if we disagree. Steps like that are basic and easy. And if you do them, while you might be taking a short-term hit by admitting that you got something wrong.

It's freeing and creates trust with people.

GLENN: Trust, no one gets it right all the time. No one does.

STU: Of course.

GLENN: If you never admit your mistakes. Then you are out of the realm of possibilities of being human.

You know what I mean?

STU: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And -- and this is part of the trust thing.

To admit that you got it wrong. And correct it. And make sure you take steps, so it doesn't happen again. That's all that people want.

They don't want the media to always agree with them. They want something that will tell them the truth.

Can you -- are you at least striving to tell me the truth?