This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.<\/p>\n
AMY<\/span> GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> This is Democracy Now!<\/em>, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report<\/em>. I\u2019m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n We end today\u2019s show with a correction. On Thursday, during a segment<\/a> 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 \u2014\u00a0well, it was sort of addressing Sam Altman, who had said, \u201cWe are deploying responsibly developed AI to liberate humanity from menial labor \u2026\u201d And Naomi, I quoted, saying, \u201cYou 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.’\u201d That was the quote. The only problem: It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n We\u2019re joined now by the real Naomi Klein. She and Astra Taylor have written a new book that\u2019s coming out in September, which we\u2019ll talk about in September, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World<\/em>. 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?<\/p>\n NAOMI<\/span> KLEIN<\/span>:<\/strong> Thank you for letting me clarify, Amy.<\/p>\n It did feel like \u2014\u00a0it does feel like I\u2019ll never get this under control, because it has gone so viral. You know, I\u2019ve written about the fact that these companies are creating digital doppelgangers of us, trying to monetize our identities. And that\u2019s all this is. I mean, it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ctheft tech,\u201d but it fed me back \u2014\u00a0Gemini\u2019s AI led me back to these other AIs as the sources for the wrong quote. So, one wonders how we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n AMY<\/span> GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> And as you said, people like Yanis Varoufakis has whole YouTube channels that are not actually him but look like him.<\/p>\n NAOMI<\/span> KLEIN<\/span>:<\/strong> Yeah, I mean, because I wrote a book called Doppelganger<\/em>, that looks at how this \u2014 predicted this very future, Yanis reached out to me. And I interviewed him about this absolutely uncanny phenomenon that he\u2019s 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\u2019t get them to go away.<\/p>\n AMY<\/span> GOODMAN<\/span>:<\/strong> Naomi, we\u2019re 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be in Martha\u2019s Vineyard<\/a> tonight for the screening of Steal This Story, Please!<\/i> I\u2019m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.<\/p>\n