Your Favorite Influencer Might Be AI

On this week’s Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel is joined by New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu to discuss the rise of AI influencers—synthetic avatars, often indistinguishable from real people, that are flooding social-media feeds to sell supplements and promote brands. Hsu unpacks her reporting on the combination of forces converging around it, including the wellness industry, a historically fertile ground for scammers. The pair discuss how the volume of synthetic content online is producing a new kind of epistemic exhaustion: a fatigue so deep that many people have simply stopped caring whether what they're seeing is real. So is authenticity already beside the point? And is an audience’s emotional response—rather than the truth behind the image—the only currency that matters? Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Tired of rage scrolling through AI slop and clickbait just to get a handle on today's news? Meet Inpress, the algorithm-free news app that makes it fun and rewarding to stay informed. Track your media literacy and rediscover reality. Download today at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Modaresi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  You have to create such a ridiculous volume of content, and it all has to feel fresh. Yeah, I can totally see why someone would be tempted to just make it on a computer.

• 1:09Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're going to talk about AI influencers. There's this post online that I think a lot about. It's from Zachary Galia, who is this social media content strategist. It reads, "Every post is a battle for three seconds. Platforms keep multiplying, content is seemingly endless, and attention spans are shorter than ever. Your content needs to capture your audience's attention immediately, and hang on to it for dear life." Maybe that stat makes your stomach drop a bit, as it does for me. What's unquestionable, though, is that the war for attention, which is fought primarily online across this host of algorithmic, infinite scroll platforms, is being fought at almost

• 1:54Charlie Warzel?

  inhuman speeds. Obsessive content marketers are in the volume game. Brands and influencers have adopted this buckshot-style approach to hawking their wares and attracting eyeballs, and that can mean doing multiple posts about the same subject or product, but from different angles and locations, all to see if they can find some way to hit that sweet spot of the algorithm and go viral. It's spamming as a strategy.

• 2:19Charlie Warzel?

  And I think it's a part of the reason why our feeds just feel so cluttered and chaotic. And trying to feed the algorithmic beast at these inhuman speeds has meant enlisting the help of, well, not humans.

• 2:33Charlie Warzel?

  Late last year, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested in a company called DoubleSpeed, an AI company that does, quote, "bulk content creation." In other words, it's a bot farm. DoubleSpeed's marketing is purposefully trolly, with claims that it is, quote, "automating attention," allowing people to create, quote, "one video a hundred ways." The banner on the company's website reads, "Never pay a human again."

• 3:02Charlie Warzel?

  Now, it's no secret that the internet is filling up with synthetic material or AI slop. The SEO company Graphite recently found that, beginning around November 2024, the internet experienced a slop tipping point, in which the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of articles written by humans. But it's not just text. Advances in generative AI audio and video have meant that it has never been easier to create fake influencers from a few short text prompts. These are real-looking people, often attractive, sometimes scantily clad women, and they're selling real products. They're attracting real eyeballs. Now, some of these online influencers are pretty easy to spot, but others are good

• 3:46Charlie Warzel?

  enough that they're duping people. And in some cases, it seems almost impossible to know for certain whether a specific influencer is real or not. We are, in essence now, just living in the uncanny valley. The stakes are real for influencers who are worried about their jobs, but also for all of us, the people who are out here navigating this blurred reality and just trying not to get scammed or duped. So are AI influencers here to stay, or are they just this passing fad? Has the internet tipped into synthetic slop for good? How can people learn to spot what's real and what's fake? To help me through all of this, I spoke with Tiffany Hsu. She's a technology reporter at The New York Times who covers the information ecosystem, including foreign influence, political speech, and disinformation.

• 4:29Charlie Warzel?

  Tiffany's been reporting on the rise of AI influencers selling supplements and other products, and she joins me now to make sense of this very strange new world.

• 4:43Charlie Warzel?

  Tiffany, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:46Charlie Warzel?

  So I wanted to start here. Let's just talk very broadly. Who is Malansky? Am I even saying that name right? Who is that person?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, she's not a person. She's an AI avatar who looks stunningly like a real person and has apparently fooled many, many of her, I think it's now more than 300,000 followers, that she is an honest to God human being. She's not. She's AI. She is meant to be an Amish lady who has several children, who posts about what you shouldn't eat, clean living. She talks about how she would never buy supermarket rotisserie chicken, which I saw as a personal front. She talks a big game about health and wellness, which is kind of surprising, given that she does not have a body.

• 5:39Charlie Warzel?

  And that's because she's a generative AI avatar, correct?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:45Charlie Warzel?

  So how did you stumble upon this account? Maybe more broadly, we could talk about how did you become interested in AI influencer avatars in general? But also, I think specifically, like, how did you stumble upon this one and, you know, decide this was like an area of reporting inquiry?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  So a mom friend actually texted me one day and she said, "So I found this account and pretty sure it's not a real person. I'm pretty wigged out. What do you think?" And I've been running about AI for a while now. I see a lot of AI. I know what the usual tells are, but I looked at Malansky and I was like, "This is incredible." Just purely from a technical standpoint, she's very impressive. And so I...

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I popped the link to her account into the group chat with the other disinformation reporters at the Times and it just blew up. My colleagues were like, what the hell is this? Uh, how do they manage to get Costco looking so real, like down to the, the labels of the products that she's holding up in the aisles that she's walking through? Um, so we were kind of stunned at how sophisticated her account was.

• 7:07Charlie Warzel?

  You have tracked Malansky down to Malansky's creator, or whatever we're calling this, the creator of a creator, you know, Russian nesting doll of, of individuals here, Jose Maria Silvestri, who is this entrepreneur you describe as using these AI avatars to promote brands. Some of them are linked to, as you report, like supplement brands, which is its own industry that is dubiously regulated and kind of a little bit of a Wild West in, in some ways. But what did you learn about Jose Maria?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  My, um, my colleague, Ken Benziger, who I wrote the story with, managed to track him down. We were actually pretty surprised that he was willing to talk because for the fact that there are countless posts on social media from people being like, you know, DM me for tips on how to make tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars on AI influencers. It's still pretty murky and people are not especially willing to chat. But Jose Maria was like, yeah, dude, let's talk. So I should back up and say that Malansky is not Jose Maria's only game. Um, he's got a, a, a network of creators that he's kind of supervising, but he, he's not the one who's creating the avatars. He like outsources their

• 8:26Speaker 02

  creation to other people and he basically pays them to talk up his products.

• 8:31Charlie Warzel?

  So a way, a way maybe to think about it, right, is like, he is, he is both the creator of this supplement product and also in a way, almost like an agent for these fake influencers for his product. Like it is kind of has this, this stable of people. There's a great picture in the article of him sitting at what looks like, you know, like Parisian style outdoor cafe, smiley, he's got the laptop. What was his attitude towards this? This is just the brave new world of business? Get on board or be left out?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. I mean, in his mind, he's building the brand, you know? He's like, score. I got, I got a mention in the New York Times, got some earned media out of this. I think for a lot of folks who are creating these AI avatars as influencers or as advertising vehicles, like they don't, they don't think it's sketchy. Even though a lot of them, including Malonski, don't disclose that they're AI. To them, it's just, it's a more cost-effective, efficient way to market something, you know? If you are able to create an avatar from scratch using AI, you can customize them to do whatever you want, to look however you want, to pitch whatever product you want.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  You don't have to pay the fees that you normally do. While researching this, I went on online, always a dangerous thing, but I went online and I looked at some of the people who are selling tutorials on how to create AI influencers. And, you know, they, they have taglines like full guide to making 30,000 a month with AI influencers. There's one company that's pitching how to create beauty influencers specifically, which is really weird again, because if you're AI generated, you don't have skin to use skincare.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  But the ad for, for these tutorials says you don't have to pay for influencers. You don't have to pay for studio shoots. You don't have to pay for, for the products to be sent out to you. We can make avatars that show a morning routine, that can replicate bathroom lighting, that can do like simple product closeups, casual camera angles. It's really easy to replicate that authentic feeling that.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Makes human influencers so popular.

• 10:52Charlie Warzel?

  Not only that, too, right? I found this great PowerPoint presentation made by this marketer online at the end of the last year that kind of goes through the digital trends of the year. And it's like obsessive. It's like over 300 pages, right? And it's talking about like what brands, what influencers need to do. One of the things they were showing is, I think, I think they used Wimbledon from 2025 as an example. And it was like Wimbledon had posted thousands upon thousands of social clips during the tournament, which is only a couple of weeks long. It's just like more content than you could ever imagine. And the idea was like, this is the strategy. It is total bombardment. It is like many, many times a day. And if you're an individual influencer and not a brand, like you should

• 11:36Charlie Warzel?

  be posting the same message, like four different ways, like from four different types of locations, you know, like try it at the bus stop, try it in your bathroom, try it at the grocery store, see what hits, right? And it's just this constant sense of iteration to see what the algorithm is looking for that day, what it's going to reward, then going back and doing that. And it seems to me that these AI avatars are like, that's a godsend for this, right? Because, you know, you can have all those at bats just by creating these prompts.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you copy pasta yourself, or you copy pasta your own AI avatar, I guess. But yeah, it's just, it's so much easier. You know, I've talked to a lot of influencers in the past who said, the job looks easy, right? You're just, you're like pointing a camera at yourself and you're talking to it. But it's actually really labor intensive because of exactly what you said. You have to create such a ridiculous volume of content, and it all has to feel fresh. Yeah, I can totally see why someone would be tempted to just make it on a computer.

• 12:34Charlie Warzel?

  But first, a quick break.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Think social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:45Charlie Warzel?

  What have some of those influencers you've spoken with, like, what do they make of this trend? Is this like existential for them? Is this kind of like, oh, well, you know, they can't do what we do? What are their minds around that?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I don't know that I can exaggerate the number of times I've heard the word panic

• 14:02Speaker 02

  from influencers, because they're like, oh, my God, these like computer bots are coming for us, and it's true. I think they realize that what they do is so easily done now by a computer that they have to differentiate themselves somehow. I know some of them are hoping that legislation is going to help them. I mean, let's be frank, it's not. Legislation, when it comes to AI, is never detailed enough, and it's always behind, just because AI itself moves so quickly. There are laws, there's one in New York that goes into effect in June that requires disclosure. But then you get into the whole thorny issue of whether or not the audience cares

• 14:44Speaker 02

  if an influencer is AI-generated. Like, let's say that Malansky did disclose that she was AI-generated. You could really make the argument that, A, people aren't going to see it. You know, we see this a lot with AI, where even if there's some sort of note somewhere that says this is an AI-generated piece of content, you go into the comments and people are like... Whoa, this is crazy. I can't believe this happened. Or wow, you're so gorgeous. What's your number? Um, or the second possibility, and to me, this is a really scary one, is that people just don't care. They're like, we know you're, you're a collection of pixels, but we like what you're saying. We like what you're showing us and we are, we are influenced. Um, and I'm, I'm seeing that, I'm seeing that a lot.

• 15:29Charlie Warzel?

  So I saw a, um, video of this blonde woman who looked like a soldier named Jessica Foster, who, you know, at scroll speed fooled me, right? I didn't really pay much attention to it, but then I, you know, I went back up and I was like, wait, Donald Trump's meeting with like, you know, this soldier in the Oval, like it kind of, you know, spidey sense went off. And the thing that I saw, the post I saw that I, I felt really captured this well was, well, what's the difference between this fake soldier woman? And some of the other people who are real, who, who some of these same, you know, men will see on Instagram.

• 16:09Charlie Warzel?

  Both are unattainable in the same way, as in like, like unattainable, not, not like in a dating sense, but in a like, I'm never going to meet this person, right? Like I'm never, I, I'm never going to live the life. I'm never going to have access to the spheres of where they are, whether that's on a battlefield or in the Oval Office or in Hollywood or in a penthouse, you know, by a pool. And I think that that's a very real thing for a lot of people, right? Like the influencer is meant to, you know, be an avatar, if even if they're real, for a life that is aspirational.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:41Charlie Warzel?

  An AI avatar can do a lot of that. And it's going to be just as hard, you know, it just hard for someone to feel like, like it's, like it's attainable.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, influencing at its root is an exercise in wishful thinking, right? So it doesn't matter if, you know, you're hoping fruitlessly that you're going to be this real person or this, um, AI generated person. My team normally covers disinformation and we came across this, this idea a lot when we were covering, the hurricanes a while back, um, in North Carolina where. There were a lot of AI images being posted of the devastation. There was one showing, I think it was like a little boy, I want to say, who was sitting on a raft with a dog, drenched, crying. So this image gets posted by a local Republican official, and immediately people on X are like, this is AI-generated, this is not real.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  And she responds in kind of a stunning way, which is to say, I don't really care where this image came from. It hurts my heart, or like, the feeling is real. And what's happening a lot on, on social media, uh, just because there's so much content, is that people are getting fatigued. They are so exhausted at having to parse what's real and what's fake, that a lot of them are just saying like, if it makes me feel a certain way, that's all I care about.

• 17:59Charlie Warzel?

  But do you think that fatigue goes the other way with people saying, you know what, like, I, I'm becoming generally over the influencer thing because of the fact that it's like, you know, i- if you're not even going to invest the bare minimum humanity into this product, like, that is, this, this product is used by actual people in some capacity, like, I'm, I, I'm gonna bow out of it. Like, do you think it could sort of erode and taint the whole idea of the influencer, like, ideal, or do you think maybe it just supercharges it?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  No, I think you're totally right. Ari, this bra company, um, posted in October this pledge that they were only going to use real people. So they said, like, a few years ago, we stopped retouching our models, and now we're going to pledge to never use an AI body. And that post was by far their most popular post of the entire year. I think you have a lot of brands that are catching on that people are over AI influence. But, but then, then on the other hand, you have, you have avatars like Aetana Lopez. She is described as an influencer who's based in Barcelona, who's a fitness girl, she's pink hair. I mean, she discloses herself as being AI-generated, but she, um, she has like nearly 400,000 followers.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Uh, she has been posting photos of herself in like, Chiapparelli dresses at Paris Fashion Week. She's got like a brand deal with Allo Yoga. Her creators have been quoted saying that she makes up to like 10,000 euros a month. So I think there is some resistance, um, to, to this, this trend, but, you know, it, they're still really popular.

• 19:35Charlie Warzel?

  Do you feel like some of this is just a literacy issue? Or do you feel like, again, it's really a change in what we expect, what we consume, and a lack of really caring?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  So I think that's a really good question. I think the answer is it's a little bit of both. I did a story late last year where I shadowed a high school class, and they were learning about disinformation and media literacy. But they had really interesting perspectives on AI influencers, which they independently brought up to me, where they said, you know, some of them are really hard to identify as being AI. You know, a couple of them mentioned, after Sora came out, there were a series of posts that featured Jake Paul, the YouTuber, supposedly embracing his queer identity and like doing makeup videos, whatever. And there, a couple of the kids were saying, we were almost duped by that. And so for them, in part, it's a media literacy issue.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  To know that AI is capable of producing stuff like that, you know, is something that they want a lot of their peers to be on top of. But on the flip side, they raise a perspective that I think journalists often forget now, just because AI is so crazy, which is that AI is really impressive. Like, it's used to create incredible things. So a lot of these kids are themselves experimenting with like Google Vio, or Nano Banana Pro, or Seed Dance. And they're, you know, they're playing. And so to them, having the possibility of influence via AI avatar is like a fun thing. You know, one of them mentioned this Influencer Studio.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  It's basically like a, it's like a modeling agency, but for AI avatars. It's from a company called Higgsfield. They have a program called AI Influencer Studio. You can pick from so many different options. It's like Sims for the new age, right? You can choose whether you want your avatar to be like human, an ant, or an iguana, or an elf, right? You can choose genders like Trans man or non-binary, you can choose like skin color, eye color. You can choose like a skin condition that includes like burns and dry cracked skin. They have settings like forked tongue, big or small horns or like fish skin.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  So I think to a certain demographic, like messing around with this is a really great time.

• 22:08Charlie Warzel?

  Right. And, and that, that makes sense. I think it's, it is important to keep in the context here. There's sort of two buckets of this, right? One is that bucket of being able to play around that these are tools. These are forms of AI, you know, detractors and critics will, will probably bristle at the phrase. But like, there is an art form to this, a creative expression form to all of this. I think we can't discount how it can be fun and it can just be like a different way for people to move through the world with the, with these avatars, right? And then I think even in the, in the brand space, in the selling space, right? Like, we got Tony the Tiger, we've got things, like we've got people who sell things that aren't real, right?

• 22:51Charlie Warzel?

  And, and yes, it's, it's obvious that there's not like a talking tiger who's real and selling you cereal or whatnot, but there is this idea of like, characters sell things. They always have, they, they always will. Brands have mascots. And so I think like, I think there's precedent probably for a lot of this stuff. And there's a lot of this that isn't like pearl clutching panic. And yet I think what interested me about your story that you did with Ken and, and the reporting is the way to in which it overlaps with this world of, of less than regulated supplements and things like that, right? That seems to me to be the concern here, right?

• 23:36Charlie Warzel?

  Is that in this moment where we're all figuring out.

• 23:41Charlie Warzel?

  How to understand this, how to read this, you know, up our literacy on all this. You have this group of people who are moving in and they're actually trying to take advantage of the fact that there is a lot of confusion in this space.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I talked to Tim Caulfield, who is a professor of health science up in Canada. And he put it pretty succinctly where he was like, people have realized that AI avatars is a great and easy way to make money. And now the scammers are like, hey, hey, hey, let's, uh, let's hop in on that. And the wellness space has always been a magnet for scammers. I'm a mom and I remember both times I was pregnant, like the absolute amount of insane content I would get served on social media. And the idea that fake people who seem real could be selling that sort of stuff to me with like a voice of authority is, is pretty scary.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Because I think more so than like fashion or beauty, like wellness stuff, people are really willing to trust because most people don't have the kind of science background you would need to really parse through. What is snake oil and what is like a legit thing? And so if they see someone who seems like they know what they're talking about, who seems to be talking from experience, you know, they're more inclined to trust. And so wellness scamming is, it has a long illustrious history of bullying a whole lot of people. And you're right, the presence of AI avatars in that space is only going to make that worse.

• 25:14Charlie Warzel?

  So when you were doing the reporting and it, you know, it led you all to, to this guy, Jose Maria, who's sort of the, the keeper of this, the guy running the brand, but not making the avatars themselves. Did you all get into, you know, how these avatars are created? There's obviously these, these programs that exist, but like the people who are sort of mercenaries for some of these, these folks, right? Did you, did you get a sense of like where the, the hotbeds of this AI avatar creation are?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Because it's so easy to make an AI avatar. You don't even need to be working in conjunction with other people, you know? This can be like a do it yourself thing. There, there, you know, there are guides all over the internet, teaching random people how could, how to do this. I could probably do it if I felt like it pretty quickly because the... The regulations are so confused and they're so lax. Not a lot of the platforms that offer like AI generation are going to stop you from creating an AI avatar. Because there's nothing inherently illegal about creating a fake person who says certain things about a certain product. You could run afoul of rules about scamming, but like the platform isn't going to be able to monitor that.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  It's not in their interest to put in a lot of resources into overseeing like how people are using the characters that they created with the program.

• 26:42Charlie Warzel?

  Well, and you mentioned with regulation that in December, Governor New York signed the nation's first legislation, and that explicitly required this disclosure of quote unquote synthetic performers in certain advertisements. You said it's kind of DOA in some sense, or it's just not really gonna like, it's not gonna have this impact. Can you say more about that?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  I think it is helpful to have the legislation, just because it sets a precedent for other attempts to regulate. And, you know, I think the more practice lawmakers get trying to regulate this space, the better they're probably going to get at it. And it, you know, it also demonstrates that the authorities care, that they recognize that there's a problem, even if the way they're going about issuing consequences is a little bit hazy. I mean, it's just so many of these creators are anonymous. A lot of them are operating from outside the country. I mean, this is, this has been a problem with all sorts of AI legislation, whether

• 27:44Speaker 02

  it has to do with deep fake porn or like political deep fakes. Dealing with commercial scammers is not super high on the average legislator's priority list. The deep fake porn is the area that most folks are really, really up in arms about at the moment.

• 28:01Charlie Warzel?

  But even there, it's like, it's also a volume game, right? It's like if you're going back to the old paradigm of like people scamming, like You know, these things are are conducted at sort of like human scale and now at artificial intelligence scale and with agentic AI, you know, and the swarms of, you know, like AI agents and doing so like it just sort of exponentializes the the ability to do this stuff. So it seems like it goes from whack a mole to like some inhuman game of whack a mole.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  I've talked to a lot of victims of deep porn or like AI generated threats and some of them have said that they've they've complained and they've managed to get the the platforms to either block or remove the the responsible accounts and then another account pops up like a day later and starts targeting them again. It's it's like turbo whack a mole, exactly what you said.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:16Charlie Warzel?

  Where do you think this goes from here? Because I get this sense that we're in, I can talk myself into it two different ways, right? That this is the first inning of a very long game, the likes of which are going to get stranger and stranger and more dystopian, although, you know, maybe we grapple with it. And the other, I think, too, is this idea that, like, yes, the world is getting weirder, more unpredictable, there's more tools for scammers and folks like this, but also this, like we were talking about earlier, this exhaustion in this, you know, of being bombarded by this digital stuff, this sort of, the internet becoming less and less human and

• 30:58Charlie Warzel?

  people dropping out or stop, or, you know, not finding themselves all that interested in it. When you think about what you're trying to anticipate and what's coming next, do you fall into one of those two camps? Do you have a different thought about where all this goes?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Given our track record as humans, I'm not incredibly optimistic about us, you know, putting our foot down collectively as a society and saying, "Stop this AI nonsense." I do think we're going to run into a lot of issues with societal trust. I mean, that's already happening. My colleagues and I just wrote a story about the liar's dividend, which is the phenomenon that happens when the prevalence of AI makes it so that people can more easily discount, like, actual footage, real footage, which is what's happening with the proof-of-life video that the Prime Minister of Israel has had to circulate.

• 31:56Charlie Warzel?

  Explain that for a second for people who will be less informed about this idea that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dead. Explain that just for a second.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Oh, God, how many hours do we have? So, in a nutshell...

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Netanyahu gives a speech that is recorded and in the reshared versions of the recording, in certain frames, he kind of looks like he has six fingers on one hand. Now, extra fingers is, or was, a pretty common tell that AI was involved. Now, AI has gotten much, much better, so that's not really the case anymore. Versions of that video start circulating where people are like, "Oh, my God, he has six fingers. This is AI-generated." Obviously, he's dead, because we always jump to that conclusion now. That the world leader is dead. So amazingly, a few days later, Netanyahu posts on his social platforms a video of himself at a cafe outside

• 32:58Speaker 02

  of Jerusalem, gesticulating very clearly with his five-fingered hands. I mean, this is, it's a proof-of-life video. And as far as I know, it's the first proof-of-life video to, like, directly address being deep-faked from a world leader, especially one as prominent as him. Okay, so he posts this video. It is verified in several different ways. The cafe itself posts its own set of images separately from Netanyahu's, showing him, like, ordering and talking to people. Deep-fake professionals analyze that video frame by frame. They're like, "We don't see any signs of digital manipulation here." Regardless, the internet

• 33:39Speaker 02

  goes, "This proof-of-life video is also AI-generated." You have people, some of them have, like, millions of followers, post copycat videos of, like, the new leader of Iran doing the same things that Netanyahu did in that cafe. Or they show Netanyahu, like, wearing a sports jersey in the cafe, just to prove how easy it is. And so, the narrative just spiraled.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  People don't trust the proof that was provided in response to the initial distrust of video proof.

• 34:16Charlie Warzel?

  Doing reporting on all this disinformation stuff in like 2016, 2017, 2018, there was so much of this idea of you think these photoshopped images are bad, like just you wait, wait till the AI stuff comes. And like, you know, the AI stuff was like in the realm of like the really bad videos of Will Smith eating pasta where his mouth detaches from his body. And there's sort of this like, okay, yeah, I can see that happening. But this idea of like, no, no, no, the lines of reality will blur so fully that it just will be a free for all. And I think that there's so many people that that received the articles that I wrote about this or the reporting I did and other people's out there was like, okay, that's

• 35:01Charlie Warzel?

  really alarmist. And I think it's fair to say that we are just actually living in that future. Like, that was a, a, you know, like 100% success rate comparison. And I think that, you know, it's not where I think a lot of people would go with, you know, an immediate jump from AI avatars to this. But you're totally right. The more that this technology comes into our lives in mundane ways, the more we expect to see it in these like unprecedented, really high stakes ways. And the more that people can basically say whatever they want to say and have plausible deniability.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, people are so, they're so desensitized to it, too. I mean, we, we keep writing about how bold a lot of social media creators are becoming now. Because, I mean, like, the administration is a mean factory. Like, we have a president who communicates through AI images and like digitally warped images of of real events.

• 36:00Charlie Warzel?

  I believe they refer to them as bangers. So that's the White House term of art.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  I got, oh, my God, I got a comment back from the White House when I was writing about this photo of a protester in Minneapolis who had been taken into custody. The original photo- Photos posted by some branches of the government show her like, you know, pretty composed. She's, she's walking with an agent. And then the White House posts a photo of her like with her skin darkened and she's sobbing. And I reach out to the White House for comment on this and they're like, justice will continue to be served. The memes will continue to be served or something to that effect. And I was like, oh, so this is, this is our, this is our communication method now.

• 36:40Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, the paradigm has completely shifted in that sense. This is a little bit of a swerve here before we land the plane. But something I was thinking about is you said, I think I could create one of these avatars using these programs. Right. And I, and I think I, I believe you, but could I get it to be like highly influential? Like if I had this thing to play with, like, like, is there still a skill game at this? It isn't the slam dunk that people think it's actually like, these people are just really good at the game. And they just happen to do it, you know, with a costume on.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Uh, short answer is yes. Um, I have a long answer. I'm going to tell you about my, my journalism white whale, which is that I have tried for years now, I think, to get a mention of my, um, one of my favorite movies into a story about AI, which is the masterpiece called Simone. Do you know this movie?

• 37:36Charlie Warzel?

  I don't think I saw it.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, it was not popular. I don't think many people saw it, but for some reason I love this movie. So in short, Al Pacino plays a director who's down on his luck because he's like not being successful. So he, he essentially creates an avatar named Simone, who he convinces everyone is a real person. Simone goes on to like win Oscars. She like runs for office and wins. Um, and Al Pacino's character at some point is like, oh my God, I've created a monster. He's like, puts all of the CDs that Simone is like imprinted on. And he tries to like bury them in the ocean and he gets like accused of murder. It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a really convoluted, like messy story.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  But the fact that an AI or a synthetic character manages to convince the entire world that she's real and she is able to exert like huge amounts of influence has always stuck with me. And I think increasingly more so because it seems like something like that could happen now that you could get someone who understands the way media works, who understands the way like Hollywood or social media or audiences in general work. And you could easily have someone who creates a character that really is compelling to a lot of people.

• 39:00Charlie Warzel?

  So real quick, what I want to do, I want to, I want to talk about this, a specific Malanskiya video, the aforementioned rotisserie chicken video with the caption, most people buy this every day. And I would love if you could like walk me through the tells here, how people who are just scrolling through their feeds and stuff are going to be able to like distinguish this, like, you know, I'm seeing five fingers, for example, that, so it's not that, like, what are some of these tells here?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  This is a little gross, but if you look at the way the chicken is dripping, I don't think rotisserie chickens drip quite so, quite so luxiously. So there's that.

• 39:42Charlie Warzel?

  It is disturbing.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. I don't want to look at that more than I need to.

• 39:48Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  One of the biggest tells from Malanskiya specifically is that if you go to the grid of her, of her overall account, you notice that she's always kind of positioned exactly the same way. She's always looking at the camera exactly the same way. She makes very similar facial movements and like hand gestures. That tends to be a tell, but it's hard to, it's hard to notice that in like a single video.

• 40:10Charlie Warzel?

  She's always kind of lit with the same like golden hour light. Like, that's what I see from the grid is it always looks like she's, it's like 5pm in the summer, you know, and she's outside. And sometimes it looks like she's, I mean, she's inside in some of these. She's like in Costco.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's actually a really good tell is lighting often. With AI influencers, the lighting isn't natural, like it kind of looks like they're being lit from all sides instead of just from one direction. If you look at some of the older videos, she looks a little bit different.

• 40:42Charlie Warzel?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  That that tends to happen with a lot of the longer running accounts. I don't know if this is the case specifically with Polanski, because she doesn't really do super closeups. But sometimes you're able to look into the irises and the reflections are different in both eyes. If you look along the hairline, often it'll look a little blurry or a little out of whack. If there's audio, audio is really, really good now, audio deep faking, but sometimes they don't breathe like a real person does. There aren't as many, like, for example, the way I'm talking, I use a lot of ums, a lot of, a lot of filler words.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  AI avatars do that less, but of course, all of these things you can deal with if you're a really good prompter.

• 41:38Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I'm just, I'm just watching this chicken drip. No liquid behaves that way. Anyway, sorry about that, to derail it, but I'm half heartened by all of this, right? Because I can still, I can't tell you always what it is, like as you're walking through that laundry list, I'm like, yep, I see that, the hairline, that that one was like novel to me, the zooming in, looking at the irises. But there is just something that my brain still recognizes as like suspect, right? And I'm also worried because I'm like, is this the last glimmer? Like, is my brain, is this the last flickering of this instinct before I lose it, you know?

• 42:18Charlie Warzel?

  Pre this conversation, cards on the table, I'm sort of, it's sometimes hard for me to get really fascinated by AI influencers because I'm just like, yeah, that's not for me. You know, that's just like not a thing that like I, like I'm not interested in engaging with an influencer who's not human. And so how could everyone be? And it seems really plausible to me in the same way. It's, it's, it's obviously very different. But if you were to tell like someone in 1989.

• 42:54Charlie Warzel?

  This guy Donald Trump's gonna be president, right? Like, like, and people are just gonna be like, he's a genius and a strategy master and all this stuff, right? People would be like, okay. That's what I'm thinking about as you're saying this. That's like, yeah, it's not gonna happen tomorrow or anything like that. Like, we're not gonna have, you know, whatever, President Simone.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:13Charlie Warzel?

  But I do think it's really interesting to think about all of that and that kind of dynamic in a world where this becomes more normalized. And also in a world where maybe that, you know, North Carolina disaster politician ethos of I don't care that it's not real, it speaks to me. If those things marry in a way, you know, culturally, politically, whatever, I do think it like, it really brings up this, this question of like, man, like, are we gonna get to the place where there's gonna be influential people who even have gained people's trust in ways that right now seem really absurd? It seems really plausible in that sense.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I completely agree. You know, I was thinking, in my reporting, I think a lot about like, identity and anonymity, because so much of the really sketchy shit that happens in my line of work is done anonymously. And, you know, recently, Banksy, the artist, has appeared to have been identified, right? As like, I think some 50 something year old man in the UK. And it just got me thinking for years, this, this guy who like, no one could really identify, was after like, changing the art world and like, commanding ludicrous prices at auction. And now that he's been identified, is that gonna change any of that? Do people really care? Or is it just the content that they're, that they're interested in?

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And, and I don't know if this is like, a tortured link back to AI avatars, but I think... I think the same question is valid. Are we at a state where we really don't care who's behind like a major cultural figure? And it's really just the image that they're putting out or the product that they're putting out that is that is more compelling to the audience.

• 45:05Charlie Warzel?

  Tiffany, this is, I think, a good place for us to leave it. I'm impressed with where we ended up getting to here from this. And I really feel like now I have, now I'm going to go and like actually contemplate like an AI avatar politician and stare into the abyss. So thank you for that. I appreciate it.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Let's leave journalism and make some real money. Seems easy.

• 45:28Charlie Warzel?

  I think it's time. I think, I think, I think I found my offer.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  All righty, let's make it happen, man.

• 45:35Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, this is great. I appreciate it.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 45:38Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guests, Tiffany Su. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klar and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smerskyak. Claudine Abaid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

• 45:55Charlie Warzel?

  If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or on Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to support this work and the work of the rest of my colleagues, you can do so by subscribing to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much and I'll see you on the internet.

• 46:30Speaker 00

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