⚙️ OpenAI shuts down five global covert influence operations 

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Good morning. Elon Musk and Yann LeCun have been fighting on Twitter, OpenAI keeps publishing new blog posts and more media heavyweights have joined OpenAI’s side.

But somehow we made it to Friday.

In today's newsletter: 

*Gamma: A presentation app for the AI era

Microsoft PowerPoint, believe it or not, is 37-years-old. It was introduced in 1987, before the internet era really began, before social media entered onto the scene and long before ChatGPT was even a blip in the mind of Sam Altman (who was two years old at the time). 

Integration, integration, integration: PowerPoint didn’t start to get fancy new AI features until 2015 with Designer, which generated thematic design options for its users. Designer got a big upgrade in 2019, and more recently, Microsoft announced its AI-powered copilot tool (which is designed to integrate with Microsoft Office). 

A new approach for a new paradigm: Grant Lee, the CEO of Gamma, thinks the time is ripe for a new presentation app, not one that has AI integrations, but one that has AI built directly into the architecture.

“It's almost like having a professional designer sit next to you,” Lee said, adding that, unlike the traditional competition, Gamma’s platform also works as an asynchronous content-sharing platform (thank you, The Cloud).

Gamma — which recently raised $12 million in Series A funding — is bent on disrupting and revitalizing the industry of business communication. 

You can join Gamma’s 18 million other users – for free – in dramatically upping your presentation game right now, right here. 

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The real problem with Google’s AI Overviews

We’ve talked a lot about Google’s less-than-stellar rollout of AI Overviews, which most notably suggested that users should add a bit of (non-toxic) glue to their pizza sauce to make sure the cheese sticks. 

But moving past the goofy or downright alarming mistakes that AI Overviews has already made in the short time since its launch, there is a broader problem at play here, a problem that will persist even if AI Overviews could be counted on to be reliably accurate, 100% of the time (and that, my friends, is a very big if). 

The problem, according to AI & linguistics researcher Dr. Emily Bender, has to do with recontextualization, where information is stripped of its context and mushed into the output of an automated system that people might mistakenly trust to be objective. 

But with AI Overviews, the context of these knowledge sources is gone, both limiting your ability to gain a broader understanding of a topic area and increasing your risk of trusting information that you otherwise wouldn’t. 

The glue pizza recipe came from a Reddit post … if a normal Google search led you to that link, you would have known instantly that it was a joke. 

OpenAI shuts down five global covert influence operations 

As OpenAI itself acknowledged, though ChatGPT might be intended for enterprises (or fun games where you try to get the chatbot to return 10 sentences ending in the word orange) the system is ripe for potential abuse. 

The company said in a Thursday blog post that, over the past three months, it has identified and “disrupted” five global covert influence operations that were using ChatGPT to spread content across social media. 

The details: 

OpenAI said that the bulk of the content focused on geopolitical events, adding that the organizations do not “appear to have benefited from meaningfully increased audience engagement or reach as a result of our services.”

My thoughts: I spoke with someone once who said something along the lines of ‘tech always creates a new problem, then ships solutions to that problem.’ I feel like I’ve been in this feedback loop of asking: ‘Okay, but is it worth it?’ I think it’s great that OpenAI shared this report, disrupted the activity and is using AI to detect when its AI has been used by threat actors. 

I just can’t stop imagining if they had never created this whack-a-mole problem to begin with.

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Deepfakes spiked more than 245% this year

A key element to the ethics of AI — and a key component of this ever-unfolding AI story — has revolved around deepfakes, that AI-powered capability to create an image or video of someone that is both super convincing and completely fake. 

This aspect of the tech has already been weaponized in ways that run the gamut from horrifying to disturbing, i.e. nonconsensual deepfake pornographic abuse, election interference and theft. 

The research: Verification platform Sumsub found that instances of worldwide deepfakes surged some 245% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2024; that number was 303% for the U.S. specifically. 

“Media platforms … need to make sure they are not inadvertently contributing to the spread of misinformation," Sumsub’s head of AI/ML Pavel Goldman-Kalaydin said in a statement. 

My thoughts: While content provenance technology does exist, such processes are imperfect and unlikely to be usable at scale this year. All I can do is urge you not to rely on social media as a source of actionable information. And always verify any piece of information from multiple trusted sources (following journalists you respect on Twitter is helpful here).

We can no longer trust anything we see online (as our next section regularly proves).

Have cool resources or tools to share? Submit a tool or reach us by replying to this email (or DM us on Twitter).

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One last thing👇

That's a wrap for now! We hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter :)

We appreciate your continued support! We'll catch you in the next edition 👋

-Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View