AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Deep Fakes and China's Theft of US Intellectual Property

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon, and we began talking about Deep Fakes and then went right into China's theft of US Intellectual Property.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates just visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Be extra careful, because the best way to defend against these deep fakes is to hold the people accountable that host them.

Good morning, everybody. It was on with Mr. Matt Gangon this morning, and he and I had a couple of conversations about this. It turns out hot topics in which both of us are very interested. Not just curious, frankly, I get on my soapbox.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:29] It is seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on Wednesday. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson, and it is a pleasure. Welcome on the program, as usual, Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, good morning. I am doing well.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:42] Thank you so much for joining us, sir. Of course, you could hear this voice you hear right now on Saturdays.

Is that correct? Mr. Peterson?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:52] Yes, you can every Saturday from one to three,

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:56] Indeed. All right, let's get right into things here. So I was watching some well done, deep fakes on YouTube the other day. They were taking a, I don't know if you've ever seen these Craig, but they were, they were taking, like impressions, like celebrity impressions of other celebrities.

Then actually. Like deep faking the real face of the real celebrity on to the person. Who's the impressionist and it's creepy. And it's all like Tom cruise. I think a couple of others, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, was one of them. It was creepy. And what I have to say here is.

Very well done. You can almost not tell this technology is getting so good. So anyway, my point in this is to ask you the question of what you can do to defend against this because, as fun, as it might be to see that kind of thing, it does have some, shall we say, nefarious applications?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:42] Yeah, big time. And we're already seen a few of these in this election cycle. I don't know if this is going to be an October surprise for one of the candidates. Defending against them gets very difficult. I do have to say, by the way, But it is more accessible to fake video or not, then it is to phony voice and the way they're doing it, some, someone has to say the words in the phrase and not have it all chopped up, but it does pose a considerable risk to all of us.

There's something called the deep fake detection challenge that's going on right now. They've got AI's artificial intelligence machines if you will. One of which is trying to create a deep fake. The other is trying to detect the deep fake made by the other device, and they go back and forth challenging them.

Then they also have people involved, more than 2200 teams, in trying to detect them. Today, they are pretty easy to detect, but if you know the technology, so I think the bottom line here, Matt, most people is if it is something that you just don't believe to be quite right. That you think this can't be right.

Do a little bit more research into it. Facebook and Twitter, and all of these other guys are working on how do they get rid of deep fakes and detect them. From a machine standpoint right now, it's easy to do, but be extra careful, because the best way to defend against these deep fakes is to hold people accountable that host to them.

So if you find something that you think is a deep phase, there is a report button there on Facebook, and on some of these other social media sites, report it. Then someone will start looking at it. Facebook this week just started having people reviewing some of these. YouTube, I shouldn't say, just had some people start examining videos again.

This year it's been almost entirely artificial intelligence, but we that see them and suspect it needs to report it so that these professionals can get involved.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:05] I saw another one, I think that was done by maybe Smithsonian or the Nixon library or something too, where somebody had made, when the moon landing happened, Nixon had prepared both a great, it just went well, and I'm so proud of the Americans for landing on the moon. A speech and he also prepared a, and everything just was a disaster, which didn't work speech. And he never delivered the second one cause it worked okay, but they had deep faked that speech, the one he never gave, like onto, onto his, the face onto somebody who was doing it. And I got to tell you, it was, in a couple of spots, it was apparent, but for the most part, it was a creepily accurate. It is a technology that is only going to get more advanced. I would bet you money that voice angled things is probably going to get better as well.

And that's a scary prospect, as cool as this technology is, it's a frightening prospect in the future. It is,

Craig Peterson: [00:04:52] The bottom line is you have to get down to the individual pixels to have a chance of figuring it out.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:57] Yeah, we're talking to Craig Peterson for our tech guru. He joins us on Wednesdays at this time.

Craig, the Chinese do a lot of really bad things on the internet, IP theft being one of them. and you believe that it's time for CEO's to stop enabling China to do this.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:12] Yeah. this is one of my political season rants.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:15] That's fine. Hey, listen. It is the season, right?

Oh yeah, exactly. I'll be talking a lot more about this on Saturday at one of course, but it really is.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:27] It's time for CEO's to stop enabling China's theft. I don't know how many times I've said it, but I go into businesses every week and find that they have been hacked by China. Their intellectual property has been stolen in 2018 alone. The US trade representative found that Chinese theft of American intellectual property cost somewhere around four, 500, maybe as much as $600 billion dollars.

The FBI is right now investigating a thousand cases of Chinese intellectual property theft. Two of those are cases I'm involved in. People, we have to protect our IP. That means, an example, and I'll talk more about it this weekend. I've got two or three i'll talk about, but one is a guy I know and this was just two weeks ago.

I found out that he had designed a new system, he's an engineer, for controlling the air conditioning systems within a building and lighting systems and made it way more efficient and effective cut costs, and yet kept it comfortable for everybody. And he had worked on it for two years.

It was hardware and some software integration, and it would integrate with almost any HVAC system out there. the Chinese stole it. What he has now is nothing. They are manufacturing it in China. He is competing against his own while he wouldn't be competing against his own design, being sold for pennies on the dollar.

Because as we know, some of this stuff is made by slave labor. Either of it is made by people who just don't get it stayed much. So he spent two years of his life designing this map and it was stolen from him. Then I'll talk about a few more that I am personally involved with. I'll talk about two of these cases that I'm involved with.

The FBI is investigating, but the bottom line, we cannot sit back and allow them to our IP to be stolen. I'll try not to get a leg up on us and let us entrepreneurs whose businesses are our retirement package. To have our retirement stolen. I have our employees' jobs stolen and have us be in a terrible spot. We have got to wake up.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:57] The Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Thank you, Craig. As always. We appreciate it. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:05] Hey, Take Care. Bye-Bye

Hard to believe. It's Wednesday already. Where does the time go here? Every week? Hey, we will be back on Saturday. Of course,

Thursday, we're going to start with one of these little lesson emails it's taken. It's a lot of time to get stuff together, and We're also taking Care of businesses with trouble that needs security help. And frankly, there's a lot of us out there. A lot of our companies that need help.

Anyhow, take care, guys. We'll be back on Saturday. Bye-bye.

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