“Digital Doppelgangers”: Naomi Klein Corrects the Record on Viral AI-Generated Quote

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show with a correction. On Thursday, during a segment on the rise of AI, I read a quote that had gone viral of the acclaimed writer and journalist Naomi Klein criticizing the AI industry. The quote said — well, it was sort of addressing Sam Altman, who had said, “We are deploying responsibly developed AI to liberate humanity from menial labor …” And Naomi, I quoted, saying, “You ingested the entire written output of human civilization without consent, without compensation, and without credit, to build a system whose primary commercial application is eliminating the jobs of the people whose work you consumed. You are not liberating human creativity. You are strip-mining it and selling it back at a markup while calling the theft ‘training data.’” That was the quote. The only problem: It wasn’t real. After the show, we learned the quote was not, in fact, the words of Naomi Klein or Sam Altman, but rather AI-generated text accompanying an AI-generated image of Klein and Altman, the quote appearing in a widely circulated graphic.

We’re joined now by the real Naomi Klein. She and Astra Taylor have written a new book that’s coming out in September, which we’ll talk about in September, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. But in this last minute we have together, Naomi, if you can talk about this quote? I mean, it had already gone viral before we, unfortunately, attributed it to you. What are your thoughts?

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you for letting me clarify, Amy.

It did feel like — it does feel like I’ll never get this under control, because it has gone so viral. You know, I’ve written about the fact that these companies are creating digital doppelgangers of us, trying to monetize our identities. And that’s all this is. I mean, it wasn’t malicious, and it was based on real things I said, but just mixed and matched, same with the photographs. It fooled a lot of my closest friends and colleagues. And frankly, when I first saw it, I thought I had said it, because I have said things very similar.

But when you think about it in the context of journalism, it really is very worrying, because it creates a feedback loop, right? I did a search this morning using a term that I knew I had used, quoting Astra, which is “theft tech,” but it fed me back — Gemini’s AI led me back to these other AIs as the sources for the wrong quote. So, one wonders how we’re ever going to get out of this house of mirrors unless companies are forced to label AI-generated work, which they should have to do.

AMY GOODMAN: And as you said, people like Yanis Varoufakis has whole YouTube channels that are not actually him but look like him.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, I mean, because I wrote a book called Doppelganger, that looks at how this — predicted this very future, Yanis reached out to me. And I interviewed him about this absolutely uncanny phenomenon that he’s dealing with, that I think more and more people are going to be dealing with, where there are all of these videos that seem to be Yanis responding to daily events, do a good job of imitating his accent and so on. Yeah. And he can’t get them to go away.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi, we’re ending the show. I look forward to speaking to you and Astra Taylor in September on your new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.

I’ll be in Martha’s Vineyard tonight for the screening of Steal This Story, Please! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.