Cybersecurity, CSA Act & AI in Hollywood | TSG Ep. 937

Ceases in chaos. Again, you're watching Textron Gang. Hey folks, welcome to the Textron Gang.

Today, we have some of our usual folks that you've seen before, John Schwartz and Whole Award and Fred Wilmont. And we're just gonna dive right in because, well, truth of being stranger than fiction, as usual, we have seen this past week, the exploration of the CSA Act has been allowed to occur. And this was the act that we created under, I believe, the first Trump administration to share information among companies and governments and agencies to make ourselves more secure.

We were gonna be more resilient. Um, apparently though some folks took exception to what CISO was saying about the election, whether that constituted a cyber attack, if you were spreading misinformation. And now Rand Paul is at the head of this committee that's basically saying that we are not gonna renew this act until somebody puts in a clause that says that this will never be part of the mission.

Frank, I cannot help but feel that we're kind of cutting off our nose to spite our face here a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, I mean there's a lot of shock and awe about what else is going on in the federal government at the moment.

We're gonna stay focused on CSA and CIS and, and some of the things that are pretty fundamental pillars in the nation's defense infrastructure. Uh, the CSA Act was designed to promote a wave Republican and private information sharing in order to characterize more effectively adversaries their behaviors and the tactics and techniques that they're using. Some of the challenges we have are today is we have created more nation state aggressors in the last 15 years than the previous.

And that's more important for us now than it ever has been. So there is a bit of irony to, to, to suggest that cyber awareness month is going to happen this month and CISA has a plan for this, et cetera, et cetera. Very exciting.

And a $524 million new, uh, building to assemble all the CISA members in one place. Yet now there's legal risk for us to consider ways for sharing information sharing, and also the arbitrary of the information sharing vetting process has been taken out of the loop. Uh, in, in addition to that, we have a notion of these, uh, uh, organizations called ISACs.

They're information sharing, uh, conglomerates in essence. Some of these are, you know, there's A-F-S-I-S-I for financial services or the healthcare isac, right? So there are, in each of the industries, a broad representation of folks that participate in public private collaboration in order to share information, share latest, uh, threats, share latest attacks, share best practices on, uh, the types of things in those industries that are insular to those industries about how they might be attacked.

Operational technology, for example, uh, is, is a key member of this. One of the challenges today is that also the sort of state local government, right? The multi-state ISAC has also been challenged in the support, uh, being cut for this.

Uh, part of that, like you said, Mike, is directly due to probably some things that, uh, may or may not be true, but irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that the funding that CIS per, uh, was provided, uh, in order to participate with the, uh, MSI SAC contributes to things like, uh, you know, whether or not you use any of the benchmarking applications that CIS pushes out as well, which is foremost part of the fabric of making sure the ecosystem and the hygiene of things like operating systems and critical applications are secure. So now with that being dropped, uh, state and local, uh, cybersecurity programs also, uh, are now sort of probably in some chaos about how they would think about some of the granting programs that might give them some more feedback, some more opportunity for cash influx, and consider that these tenants are basics for dealing with the fundamental risks.

So if the CISO of Washington State, for example, had significant challenges and wanted to court other CISOs from that perspective, hey, um, good luck, right? Go go after the folks that you know and collaborate with them, but now, you know, you're a little bit on your own. Uh, the challenge we have here is in a time and place when you start to see that, that 49% of CISO's budgets are being, uh, either stagnated or, uh, declining, and you're expecting the private sector to pick up the, the, the things that the public sector is not providing at this moment, uh, in the federal government.

And, and that is a recipe for absolute chaos. Mm-hmm. So this is really, at its core, a national security issue, and yet we seem to be wrapped up in little political mandates that are kind of hurting us through the extreme.

And there's a couple of things in here, John, I'd love to get your opinion about, but is the way forward for this thing is that we just scrap cisa and somebody else will come up with some other agency that does something similar, but with a different title and maybe a slightly narrow remission, or we'll, Congress eventually sort this thing out, You know? Yeah. They can go down two paths, and I think they're gonna probably take the latter path after there's some sort of a cataclysmic event or something that's incredibly embarrassing, because, you know, they had a good thing going with csa and, uh, I know the topic at RSA back in April in San Francisco, we did a segment on this was just the dismantling of this organization and this cooperative that's, that was working and, and it was, was lauded.

And now it's, it's, as you said in the, in the opener, it's chaos all over again. And, um, whether there is a separate organization, organization created or a partnership created, I don't know. And this climate, I don't think much of anything's gonna get accomplished.

I mean, for God's sakes, our government shut down. Um, this, this was, I mean, the, they created cisa and they destroyed CSA for political as well as other reasons, mainly political, in my opinion. Um, I don't think this is gonna lead to anything good.

They're only gonna, we talked about this yesterday, people usually act and organizations only act when there is some sort of embarrassing incident that forces them to act. And I think we're going down that road. So to your point about that, Congress is playing politics ha hackers popping champagne.

Exactly, Yes. Pretty much. Exactly.

I wish it was just hackers. I think it's nation states and very bad actors indeed. But to put that a finer point on this thing, um, no company, I don't think Fred is gonna voluntarily share that they got breached because they're gonna be worried that the, some regulatory body's gonna be on their case and they're gonna get fined for it.

So if we don't have a framework for that, will everybody just retreat to their respective corners and keep all their threat information secret to themselves? I think you've got two major potential outcomes of the lack of this, uh, the lack of the, the steel thread here that binds this in the, in the industry, the first of which is, uh, all of the private companies, uh, and public companies are going to find ways to collaborate in ways that are not transparent to anyone else outside. Maybe the ISACs continue to persist.

There is a cast cash to play in. Some of these others are free. Uh, the second part of that is the collaboration with this is actually the most important part in my mind.

Uh, the, the collaboration with the federal government, AKA disclosing some of the relevant details about things that have happened, right? There are, there are historical events where, you know, when somebody, when when the FBI recognizes that you might have been compromised, right? Or you're a member of the defense industrial base, there is a, there is collaboration that happens there.

The in talk and other organizations will facilitate both sharing information and also they'll come and, and support and breach response in those cases, uh, sort of like the, the US Postal Service consider that the team and task force of folks that are generally, you know, sort of mandated around managing the soc part of that, the cert part of that problem space, which is the emergency response part of that couple, that with the lack of information sharing, right? That is now inevitably going to happen because like you said, there is liability associated with information sharing, whether it's to your insurer, broker provider, or the federal government, right. And fault to be found.

And this, uh, was a get outta jail free card conversation that could be, had to take that up one or two levels without the scrutiny requirements of, you know, is this a hundred percent right? This is the Good Samaritan law in cybersecurity. And in this particular case, when you remove that, this is exactly what happened.

So, hey, that's a horrible wreck on the side of the road. But I mean, if I show up there, I'm going to jail. I'm not, I'm, I mean, I hate to do it morally, but, and that's what, that's what this potentially could do.

The, the reflexive might be there's going to be a new organization. It's not going to be, you know, a federal mandate. It'll be something ascribed to buy, you know, the largest companies in the world.

But also there's a level of oversight around some of that requirement that I think is, you know, important to have. And so as we enter this era with ai, uh, and we have some of the largest companies in the world doing things in this sort of set of, uh, circumstances, it's incredibly important for that transparency and also that collaboration to be something that we don't take away the Good Samaritan law. Is there an opportunity, and I'll ask John this, and then maybe Fred can weigh in a little bit, but for some sort of international body to step in here, the issues that we're talking about, not just to the us, I mean, every Western democracy and countries in Africa all have the same issues.

So we have things like the five is organization, is there some room, John, do you think in, in the world to create something that feels like csun but at a bigger scale? But maybe it doesn't address some of the, uh, liability issues, but at least it's something. Yeah, conceivably, I mean, even last week, remember at the un the General Assembly had this idea, it's kind of a pie in the sky idea about oversight of AI in, in terms of responsible use.

I think if Europe is a leader, although United States is on an islands, this is where I put my Allen hat on, right? This is that we're, we're in an island, we're going it alone. So we're not gonna encourage this.

But I, I do think in terms of, um, Europe, maybe general, something, I, I, I don't have a high degree of hope that's it's gonna happen. I mean, I hope it does. Um, maybe someone will fill the void because, and, and if almost every instance involving this country, not just cybersecurity, somebody else is filling the void because we've abdicated it or vacated, its, I don't know.

What do you think, Fred? I think you're a hundred percent right. There's an opportunity for that.

Uh, Europe is much slower, uh, in progress largely, and, and, and will love this, you know, in part to things like privacy and paying attention to the rights that we violate or, and or give up. But in addition to that, a part of the challenge is right, when we look at this as a, as a US problem, not only is it in our best interests because of our, uh, situation, uh, and the amount of infrastructure of the internet that we own, uh, manage, maintain, whatever you wanna call it, uh, it's a fundamental requirement for us, right? It is a brokered chip in the biggest game there is on the planet.

And we're, you know, woefully giving it away. There are some things that Europe is doing, uh, in order to deal with some of the repercussions of breaking up things like what does a national vulnerability database look like when, you know, we don't support CVEs and things like this, but that challenge, that adoption is a five and 10 year problem space, right? So it's not just can they evolve it and get something more, you know, or something, right, to fill the gaps.

It's the time that it will take and the damage done in between versus the maintenance and in, you know, and the infrastructure required to do such a thing on our behalf. So I think it's, uh, it's super shortsighted, right? Mike, you mentioned cutting your nose off to spite your face.

In my book, this is a hundred percent giving away both our, you know, our credibility, but also, you know, our ability to, uh, defend and protect, uh, the United States and the government infrastructure as well as the civilian infrastructure that support it. All right? Let me throw out a theoretical just for grins and see if there holds any water.

But let's say that I have an organization and they are victimized by an attack, and then they have a lawyer who's somewhat enterprising, who then files a lawsuit and maybe first files a freedom of information request to determine what the government knew or did not know about this type of attack. And then Sues said government, because it didn't disclose the fact that it knew that this attack vector was out there and failed to share that information, and therefore is jointly responsibility for the liability to that organization's pain. So, Fred, is that a, is that a feasible court case that some enterprising lawyer might file?

A hundred percent. I'm sure that, I'm sure that would happen. In fact, it could become, you know, just as we look at multiple things hit by multiple types of ransomware, for example, that could become a class action, right?

And a whole bunch of other things that go along with it. Um, absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Now, the sad part about this is the average person doesn't seem to understand that the country is really under threat from all this stuff. I mean, here in New York, we're all still talking about these sim cards that were found outside the United Nations in New York and New Jersey, where, uh, at least the, the thought is that they belong to some sort of foreign actor out there. And I won't point fingers at the country yet, but we all pretty much have a good idea where that one's coming from.

Um, is John, is this ever gonna get to the level where the average person recognizes the fact that their company is under threat, that's their livelihood. And if I take a company offline for a week and they don't have enough, can't generate any revenues, people are gonna get laid off. Yeah, they're gonna, so I, I, I have this theory, and I've, we've written about this over the years, is that individuals, when it comes to cybersecurity, privacy, personal information, they don't really care.

The, the rank and file really don't care unless they are directly affected, and they're only only care unless they're made whole. And then they move on and they have a very short memory. So there might be a huge incident, there have been over the years that have affected millions of Americans, and eventually they forget about it, and they go back to their old habits, and I, I suspect this will happen.

Or they, or if their company's affected, they, they go to the B choice, the plan B. So, you know, the one thing, Mike, that's so scary to me, and, and you talked about the nation states getting involved at the same time that's happening, we've got these biggest tech companies spending more than a trillion dollars on building out their infrastructure and, and creating this, this system that becomes even more appetizing in a sense to nation states is more money in the economy courses, its way through AI systems. And I just think it's a collision course that's inevitably gonna happen in some sort of form or way.

Alright. And before the show, we discussed the fact that security is not your jam, but as you listen to all of this, what's your take? I mean, to me it's like we're begging for a cyber war.

Um, letting CS six expire is like cutting your phone lines, mid cyber war. Like, you're, you're essentially saying you're open for business as a country. Um, this is, this is not the, this is not politics, this is, this is like beyond that.

But I don't think that our legislators get that, and that's kind of scary. I've learned a lot this segment guys, but I, I, I am one of those who does not pay attention to security necessarily as much as I should. But I definitely am gonna be keeping an eye on this because this is very eye-opening as to where we are as a country Friend.

I've met many cybersecurity people, as have you, and they come in all flavors, and some are red and some are blue. But will they kind of suspend their political discussion amongst themselves to maybe quietly have these conversations in the background about threats and things that they see because they do realize that they are mutually dependent on each other? Yeah, I think it's a good call out.

The mission matters to a lot of people that do this, do this job, do this work, right? It's not necessarily the title. It's not necessarily, there's not a lot of, uh, uh, glory that comes with it, right?

Um, they do it because they believe in it, and there's definitely gonna be, you know, some, some collaboration and some getting together and do it before there was any of this, any of this existed a long time ago. Quick aside, IRA style, quick aside, in, in, uh, in the very early, uh, 19 99, 2 thousands, there was, uh, we lost a spy plane in China. It was a significant problem for us, and we weren't able to get it back.

And this was the birth of, uh, hacktivism, right? And the, for the first time, probably ever, there were some nationalistic tendencies in the United States and other places, uh, versus, uh, the United States. And so there was an essence, an ongoing cyber war between, uh, China, uh, called Project China and the United States.

And it was off the grid after, you know, 7:00 PM you know, at whatever company that you worked at, you were looking to take down infrastructure and help support the cause. Will something like that happen again? Yeah, I mean, the, I don't know if you know about the, the, the cyber market and Reprisal Authorization Act.

There's a new thing that, uh, that, that's been pushed in, in Congress, basically, that will allow for, or present basically a, a set of operators to have a letter of mark in similar sense to like the East India company, if you will, to go and, and basically take on some of the things that are outside the jurisdiction, right? Of the us. And so you can think about this, this is reprisal activities, right?

In this sense. So just combine those two thoughts. Yes, there is definitely a culture that allows us to think about people outside the normal balance.

We'll probably take this and be very offended by the fact that we are now at a, at a significant disadvantage to other places. There are other things like the civilian reserve, uh, uh, uh, or auxiliary ISACs people that are bonding together in different groups to, to, to talk about it. But then there's also this notion of getting a letter of mark to say, Hey, look, you can actually go out in privateering, right, in some of these space.

So we're gonna see a lot of interesting things come out of this. I'm not sure good or bad, but you're definitely gonna see some outcomes. All right, folks, you heard it here.

Look, there's no two ways to sugarcoat this thing. Bad things are about to happen. If you're concerned about it, write out, write an email to your local congressman, write an email to Rand Paul or jump on that thing called True Social and tell the president directly how you feel about this.

But I think you gotta let these folks know that, hey, you know what? This is bad for all of us, regardless of what color you prefer to line up on behind. Anyway, we'll be back in a minute.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, folks, we're back and we're gonna move on and talk a little bit about ai, but the folks over at Citi think that they are gonna train all of their employees on the nuances of prompt engineering. John has a story about this on tech strong ai.

Joan, is this the wave of the future? We're all gonna get prompt engineering training courses in our companies. What do you think?

I'd say, if you're in the financial industry, um, maybe yes. Um, so Citicorp, uh, JP Morgan and Bank of America to, to one extent or another have, um, mandated AI prompt training for their, uh, employees. In the case of C Corp on Tuesday, they announced that their 175,000 employees across 80 locations have to complete this coursework based on effective AI prompt creation.

They called it a key skill for the future, at least one of their executives did. So the initiative comes is Citi has already embraced AI tools and daily workflows, um, through the first part of this year. Their workers have entered more than six and a half million prompts into the systems and their AI systems for tasks, um, that normally took hours, and now they can be completed in minutes.

So there is a broader trend in finance. As I mentioned last year, JP Morgan announced all new hires would receive AI training, including instruction, prompt engineering. Um, there are other major corporations have announced similar training efforts.

There's Moderna, Verizon, and as I said, B of A. So it, it seems to be inevitable for many companies. I think we talked about this briefly yesterday about skilling and, and ai and the extent to where it's, it's headed, and I do think it's gonna grow, um, and whether the impact is on their job security is up in the air, but, um, I think it's inevitable How much of this though is, is because they're under regulatory pressure regarding data controls.

Uh, last year I think Reuters reported that cities troubles were linked to skill gaps and data compliance, digital literacy, like this was identified as a risk to them. So how much of this do you think is related to that? I think, yeah, it is.

Like I was almost kind of forced in a certain sense. Yes, I, yeah, you're alluding to some of these issues they've had. Um, and I think it's, I, but I also do think it's just inevitable regardless of the organization.

Um, I, I, I see it happening across the board at almost every, at any type of business. I just think it's, it's essential, uh, in certain tasks, you know, we'll start off at a very basic fund foundational level, and then it will accelerate from there. Um, my fear always, and I always bring this up, is what it means in terms of job stability.

That's a debate. Or we, you can argue both ways, what's gonna happen, but, um, and I just think it's, it's just here for now, and it's here for the future. I'm gonna be a little contrarian on all this.

So, um, there's no harm in it. But at the end of the day, I also feel like this is some C-level execs getting on a soapbox to stand up there and say something profound, because let's be honest, let's look at where these AI agents are going. I don't have to be your prompt engineering rocket scientist to make an AI agent do something.

In fact, the whole point of having the AI agent was so that people didn't have to sit around and master all these stupid little prompts. And I'll go a step further. It's nice if you have that skill, that's great, but that's not the thing that's gonna make you useful in ai.

It's gonna be your ability to organize and orchestrate a bunch of AI agents using regular natural language. And I'll take it even one step further, if the mission to accomplish that goal requires you to write five different prompts to string them together to get the damn thing to do what you want to do in the first place, that's called broken. So, Yeah, no, yeah.

I, I vacillated Mike. Yeah, I, I vacillated back and forth on, it's like, you know, it's kind of essential people should understand some basic functions, but on the other hand, it just, it creates, it's gonna create some chaos. It's gonna create, um, all sorts of angst and anxiety, but it's also mandated from the top to justify this push of why we're buying or why we're purchasing AI agents, and what are they gonna do?

It's gonna be, um, it's, it's gonna be pretty messy. I think it already is. That's why we don't see or hear a lot of case studies or success stories about, about early AI adoption, because they're, they're all just flailing about right now.

Well far be me to be the optimist. But, uh, let, lemme just say two quick things and lemme pass it to Ann. But the first thing is, is there's a whole generation of folks that, that have not, you, you gotta remember the, the average age of folks in the workforce, right?

There's a whole lot of folks that did not, you know, get their hands on this when they were young enough and their, you know, the, the mental elasticity was, and the neuroplasticity was allowing them to really take advantage and do great things. What we know is that this is here to stay. And kudos, right?

This is a requirement for every business to understand and to protect the data that they have, the customers that they have. I mean, you need to know how to ask questions to get answers faster, quicker, more effectively. And it plays into the philosophy of really providing some good guardrails.

And education is always the first exercise. If that doesn't go well, well, okay, then we put in different guardrails, but you have to start here. So I think it's terrific that at least whether it's a mandate or otherwise, these guys are leaning in here to help support the existing workforce, irrespective of what effect that has on the future workforce to, to make benefits.

But, uh, I, I think it's great. I mean, to some extent it's perfunctory, right? Like they're doing this to avoid more regulatory slaps, more security issues.

And from their perspective, it's probably a nice lazy way of getting people skilled up upskilled, you know, uh, which is probably one of, I think the most compelling use cases for AI in a, in a business is upskilling. Um, but in my own business, it's been very interesting. So I have six full-time employees and a bunch of freelancers, and I would say within two, three months of OpenAI coming out, I had to put together a policy, uh, for my staff of how, how to use it.

Because it was interesting who came to me and said, oh, yeah, I'm loving this. This is cool. Here are these tools.

And then who didn't say anything and then was clearly using it and using it badly. It was very like eye-opening to me as a boss. Uh, but I, I, you know, have had to terminate freelance writers for, for using it.

And then the way I handled it with my clients is to say, in my contracts, we will disclose the use of any AI tools because I, I'm an agency. I runoff human time. If I am going to not use human time, it is my duty to report that.

Keep in mind, I'm from a family of auditors, fraud examiners. Uh, so that was how I chose to handle it. But I can only imagine how many businesses are never gonna do that.

Uh, we'll just use it and try and pass off AI as human. And to some degree you could do that a little bit. Uh, but I think that there's a recipe for fraud here, especially when people are billing human time.

I think there's an upside here on this regard, and I wish more companies would do this. Um, AI creates the excuse to go back in and retrain everybody about how the business actually works. There's so many people working in these organizations that kind of are just faking it.

And they don't mean the faking it, it's just that they never really had the proper training in the first place, and they got brought in, they got, they, they perform a function, they're a cog in some giant wheel, and they don't really understand where things actually fit and they where they should go. And I think every company should take a minute and say, look, we are entering the age of ai, but it's not just about prompt engineering. It's about how to think about how the business functions and operates, and then how to make all these AI agents your friends.

I think that's a great way to say that and let's go do that. But, um, you know, just to sit down and say, you know, we're gonna have a class full of people sitting in a room doing prompt engineering, I mean, I'm like, sign me up for traffic school. It sounds more interesting.

Hi, how enthusiastic is anybody about group training? How enthusiastic, other than it's like a day off kind of, just kind of, This is a, probably a poor comparison, but, you know, it kind of reminds me of like, when I was at Dow Jones, and even now with the Futurum group, and Mike and I had to go through this. You, they give you this, um, you know, we have like these little, these little, uh, 30, 40 minutes online courses we have to take, uh, whether it's on cybersecurity or workplace environment, what, what have you.

And I almost kind of think about this, where it's being, in a sense, force fed a little bit. Um, I guess it's considered essential, but it also kind of gives me that same feeling. And nobody wants to do those, but, and usually they take 10 minutes to, to complete, but you're forced to be online for 40 minutes for some reason.

Um, I don't know this, it's, there's elements of that to this, this whole kind of push. Uh, do you think, Ann, that there's gonna be a whole cottage industry of people out there who are gonna be like, whoa, we are prompt engineering trainers and we'll show their organization and do There already are there are, yeah, there already are consultants. I mean, in my industry, right?

I've already seen like rebrands of, we're the AI agency. We know how to do ai, AI search. We know how to do, like, there, whenever there is confusion, there's opportunity, right?

And so a lot of people don't understand this. They, they don't, I think for a lot of people that I know, varying ages to Fred's point, you know, older people, they want in, but they don't know how. And so anybody who's gonna take the hand and say, I'm gonna tell you how AI is good for you.

They're, they're of course gonna exist. But I've already seen that. Yeah, it would be interesting.

Maybe it's just not a company thing, but maybe towns and cities should have efforts to increase the literacy of their citizens. And because the More you, how about Congress? Yeah, somebody, but the more people understand how it works and then what it does, the more money they're likely to make, the bigger the tax base.

I don't know, Fred, jump in here. What do you think? I love it.

Uh, I think all that, and by the way, uh, let me know when we're gonna put up the signs for your, uh, your possible election campaign. But the, the theory behind how this can bring communities together is a terrific one. Uh, and part of the challenge is all of the ways that we behave today are preventative for that type of thing.

So that kind of town hall situation, that kind of collaboration would be really, really cool to see. Um, couple that with the slight cynical approach, uh, or thought process around this is like, look, if the federal government is taking percentages of large organizations that do this homework, recognize that just as we've had programs to monitor network traffic over time, uh, for, you know, a federal infrastructure and private infrastructure as well, similar things are true here, right? Which is what you do online is still what you do online, whether it's in this particular prompt, in that particular model or anything else.

And that, as much as anything else from a watchdog perspective is something people should talk about. Get together, play bingo over, I don't know, and, and think about thoroughly. Well, here's my question for you, Fred.

Um, augmented reality had its killer moment, at least in my eyes when I had my, my nephews and niece who were very young using Snapchat and putting stuff over their face, Instagram, using these tools and not knowing what they are. That's what I would consider the killer moment has, where it reaches the zeitgeist has, and, and people don't know they're using it. Has AI reached its killer moment?

Ooh, I don't think yet. I don't think yet. I don't think yet.

When people are using it, not conscious of using it. I think that's where, where we're at. And that doesn't, AI overviews and search don't count.

Like, yeah, I think we're getting there. When I see my mother, I think my 75-year-old mother using it, then I will, then I'll say that I, that I think that you, when you get the adjacency effect, when you combine in three or four or five different ways or paths that you normally would go find information or participate in a conversation, or, you know, I don't need to go to the bank anymore, that, those kinds of moments where all of those pieces get put together for you in one simple way. I totally agree.

And I think it's really a cool thought exercise to think about that, Anne, that's when we think about what does the future hold for us when we put on, you know, Google glasses and what you're able to do now as you walk down the street, why do I need to walk down the street again? Those kinds of things become really available then. That means all those paths are talking about, yeah, I mean, five-year-olds are, you know, hacking computers with glasses.

I mean, it'd be, I'd love to actually see that. When can I plan a trip with OpenAI book the tickets or whatever chat bot? When can I plan a full trip and not have to get out a credit card book on a separate set?

When does that moment happen? Yeah, I think we're getting there, but that's what I, is a, is a, a surfer of emerging tech for many years. That's, that's the moment I'm always looking for.

I think we obsess a little bit too much about the disruption level because everybody's kind of freaking out about their jobs. But the truth of the matter is, we don't have enough people to fill up all the tasks that we need to do today. So we gotta automate more of those tasks so that we don't have people sitting around doing mindless, numb crap all day long and doing something more meaningful and interesting that drives actual value.

Well, I says that I, I, yeah, that might be the upside of this. And the people who are resistant to change, and they're tend to be older people, maybe in this case, it opens their eyes to what they can do now it frees them up and, and leaves the menial, um, stuff to, to the, to the automation. I mean, there is a huge upside to this Cautious optimism.

Yeah. I mean, we're not shedding tear, we're not shedding tears for the elevator operator or the horse buggy operator, right? And, and we know that these are the costs of innovation.

I have a lot, I I have a long list of things I hate doing, and I, I, I put 'em on a list, so I'm waiting for an AI agent to do it for me. So, so the only thing I would say here is you guys are, are probably familiar, Meredith Whitaker, uh, CEO of, of signal, um, which may be the only, you know, secure privacy thing. And for you, uh, that is left around, uh, in, in our industry, and she had some really thoughtful words around agent AI and what the implications are.

Yes. I mean, almost to the exact case that, that John just described. But what does it look like when you have the ability to, yeah, just go book a ticket, notify my friends, right?

The plan, the best, uh, plan the best, uh, itinerary for me and so on and so forth. What does that require? Well, I'm gonna do that on my phone.

Well, that requires that somebody has complete access, uh, to your credit card information, your banking information. Somebody has access to your, um, all of your contacts, uh, and then can willfully and indiscriminately, you know, submit emails to people or signal notifications in signals case. That means that, uh, your itinerary, your flight booking, uh, your information that is your identity, right?

In order for you to book a flight these days, right? All of that information has to be given to somebody, and that has to be, you know, basically managed and or not managed. The, the thing to consider is what are you giving up in the exchange of convenience for doing such a thing?

Not saying it's right or wrong, but, you know, look, if, if, uh, if folks that are over the age, uh, of the working, you know, the working, um, culture today are struggling with ways not to get phished, I mean, this is not an area, right? That is, you know, we should wander into blindly. And, and, and so I think some of the watchdog things that Meredith had to say about that, particularly relevant, when we think about what Agen AI is gonna do and fake arrogant, There are scary things and good things, and we're just gonna have to experiment on each other and see how it goes.

But we're really along on this block and, you know, look, AI's not going away, so you might as well embrace it. We'll be back in a minute. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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com. Home of Security Bloggers Network. Hey, folks, we're back in also under the heading of Stranger Than Fiction.

There's now an AI actor who's out there and apparently has a name and will be getting roles, and of course, the folks who run the Screen Actors Guild are not too happy about this. But, but there are other tools out there where maybe we're all gonna be creating fake people and inserting them into various social media messages and campaigns. But, and this feels like a brave new world, what should we expect To quote the Infa?

Uh, a nearly 20-year-old viral video David after dentist, is this real life Hollywood is raging, right? Uh, the synthetic actor, Tilly Norwood, uh, has been slammed by SAG AFTRA and stars like Natasha Leone, uh, as threats to real jobs and artistry. And the stories show the clash between AI and ai and its power to democratize creativity and the fear that it could erase human talent.

Coupled with that, we had Tuesday, you know, same week open AI drop, so, or two, the new video generator and social app that lets people remix clips, uh, and drop their own lightness into AI made scenes. Uh, right now it's invite only, which has sparked a frenzy, and people are actually reselling their invite codes. This is how popular it's become.

But unlike TikTok or reels, uh, that also have these limited AI capabilities to create videos, SOA stands out because of the cameo feature, so you can drop your own face right into videos. And so this really made me think, okay, what happens to us when the majority of videos we consume our ai, and they're also highly personalized. Coupled, you know, couple this couples with the realization with Tilly Norwood that AI is already turning Hollywood into kind of a hall of mirrors, uh, where the star and the story and the audience can actually all now be synthetic.

Um, so I think this is this just put to the forefront that our future of AI slop is going to get worse. Um, and so I think the two coming out in the same week, or happening the same week was very serendipitous, but I mean, the response and the backlash from Hollywood was palpable. And I think we're gonna continue to see this.

Although the creator said it was an art project, I, I think they were just, you know, putting it out there to see. But I, I think it's, it's very interesting where the future of entertainment is heading as well as the future of social. You know, what was really, you know, was, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Uh, you know what was really terrifying though about the, the, the synthetic actress was that there, there was talent representatives who were interested in it. Her, um, already she's creating a buzz. I looked at her and I, I whipped her sizzle reel, and I was like, Jesus, it looks like a real person.

I'm sorry. Anyway, I just wanna point that out. Hollywood hates that because they Love it.

Yeah. But then there's, there's going to be a blacklisting of any, anyone who picks picks it up. There's gonna be a, the pendulum's gonna swing back.

Yeah. Well, Well, I was gonna save this for another show, but there's also a bill that some fellow in Ohio put together that said that we cannot ascribe rights to any of these digital entities. So, you know, it's not clear to me that they will have the ability to actually be represented by somebody unless somebody says they own them, per se.

But here's the thing, Ann, and here's what I'm torn about. On the one hand, I kind of like the idea that, um, people can create art and they don't need, you know, $40 million budget to go make a movie. And it might be interesting, and it might have a good story.

To your other point, though, the odds of that happening means that they're so low that I'm gonna be inundated with millions of bad movies that somebody created just gonna overwhelm the feeds, and I'll never find the good content because I, it'll be lost in a slop. The thing is, there's too much money at stake for this to keep in mind. If, if humans are put off by what they are seeing, then there will be a dramatic reversal of this content proliferating these social networks, right?

So if humans vote with their time and attention, which they should, you should also vote with your dollars. If people can do that, then AI slop will not win. It's, if we all mindlessly agree to sit and watch it unchecked, then we're rewarding it to the platform, and the platform will feed us more of it.

Fred, do I need a label on a movie that says that no AI was used to create this content before I decided to go see it? I think the question's gonna be is how much, uh, in the cost of things is this going to change? Right?

If it costs now, you know, $30 to go see a movie, or I can buy a movie that was recently and such and such for $20, because if, if we're producing movies that cost, you know, one, 1000th of what it costs to produce a blockbuster, and then we're able to offer it for almost nothing, right? Irrespective of whether or not I think it's better or worse, that's going to completely destroy the industry. And I think the concern that I have there is, you know, when quality becomes indistinguishable, that's when we've reached the, I think the, the tipping point.

And when the change agents for that quality are not brokered in privacy or rights or some of the other important watch groups, then there's no counterbalance to the financial, you know, wherewithal and incentivization. So yeah, I think we do need some labels. Uh, I'm not sure that's gonna matter.

Uh, my hope is, and again, not to be a cynic, is that there's a way to embrace this in the appropriate manner, to use that to reduce the cost, but increase the value and not, you know, sort of germinate a set of, of agents that become actors. And we live in, you know, a complete, uh, lack of reality, not just, uh, we wanna be the heroes on tv. Mm-hmm.

I think part of this too, though, is like the studios themselves, you know, they copy each other like crazy. One gets wind of the fact that someone's making a movie with X Star, and then they go make their own version of that movie with a different star. And it's not very creative, it's just copying everybody else's.

And then if somebody gets lucky and you know, has a hit, you can bet that within a year there'll be more movies just like London. It will become a series. But now that may be only weeks now between when the new movie that took off is followed up by 10 other movies that are kind of very similar behind that.

So, and there's the whole thing just become this kind of weird ass digital factory. It could, but last I checked, humans still have to, uh, have some piece or, or some control of this, right? A human still has to sign up for the service.

A human has to double check it, A human has to release it. There are checks and balances to some degree there. But again, if people are putting this out and putting it out quickly, and no one is watching, it's not gonna, it's not gonna keep happening.

Um, I think that the similarity that the, the arguments for Tilly Norwood were essentially, well, this is like animation. Um, and so I think what we may see first is just a really, like a really bad batch of faux animation AI movies. But the fact is, they haven't figured out how to cross the uncanny valley.

I'm still creeped out, and I can spot AI videos very, very quickly and very easily, and I, I do a lot of, of work to try and educate people as to, you know, one of the big controversies, uh, with this, when I first saw it come out was, you know, the PTY trial. Um, there was a narrative that formed that Justin Bieber had, uh, some secret song that people had, uh, people had put out there, or that Justin Bieber had written about what had happened to him. And so I had several very smart, educated people within a day or two send me this alleged video that Justin Bieber had written this song that alluded to him being victimized.

And that never happened. That song was never written. What happened in real life, we don't know, but we know that that song was never written and it had convinced so many people, and I took the time to educate every single person that sent me that.

This is why this is fake. If this video immediately fits the narrative of, of something that is out there as a rumor or gossip, know that you should immediately question it. And so this is just, this is gonna keep happening.

I think the news and entertainment, the news is more likely for this to happen. We're seeing it with politicians, we're seeing it all across the board. If it fits a narrative, it's more likely to pick up.

Those are going to, those videos are going to continue and proliferate because they get watched. Whereas Y you know what movies, Who knows, You know? So there is gonna be a lot of float, some coming out in terms of AI generated movies or whatever you you wanna call 'em.

Yeah, yeah. There's what's the difference? But, um, there's a precedent in Hollywood.

Remember, easy Rider, easy Rider was like this low budget movie that nearly ruined the industry. Everyone wanted to try to replicate what they did. And to this day, uh, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, rest in Peace, will never Will.

They had no idea what they were doing. And, and it turned out to be this serendipitous hit. And I think that's what terrifies Hollywood.

And that's why there was a strike over the idea of ai, creating scripts, using voices, voice actors being rep replaced, editing being used in ai, this idea that there will be somebody, there's gonna be somebody out there who's very talented, who's gonna create something through AI that's gonna be a hit. And, and the studios are gonna be stumbling over themselves, trying to replicate it, but there's also gonna be a lot of junk, right? Quick question.

I want to get to Fred here on one thing, Fred, will I need your permission to stick your license in a or your likeness in a movie that I'm creating? I mean, No one will even know. And the, the debate about whether or not it's actually my likeness, right?

Something that people are gonna, you know, fight about for years, I'd just be thrilled. Look like stop making, stop remaking Patrick Swayze movies. Like maybe some new Thought Process and new character development, new plots, new things are, you know, build up here.

So it could be a great opportunity for Hollywood to get out of the, you know, the rut that it's in, right? With recasting, the same characters in the same movies, over and over and over, and sequels and all the things. Make something new and make it innovative.

And this is probably a good challenge, uh, for the, for the, the narrative here for, you know, if you're going to sit atop the, the class of this artistry, then you probably have to do better work. And so that's probably great too. I don't know if that's what's gonna play out, but I, I think that's a positive opportunity here for, for Hollywood.

Todd, we can agree that Roadhouse never needed a remake. No. Terrible, terrible.

That was Wrong. That was upsetting. Don't do that.

Terrible. I mean, everything, I'm not, I'm not entirely sure it ever needed to be made, but that's, yeah, It made, made in the first place What agree to disagree. Hey, I do wanna thank our guests for sharing their knowledge and their insights.

And I also want you to start thinking about, well, maybe what might Techstrong Gang the movie look like someday? Who knows? But maybe we'll find out.

I wanna thank everybody for watching, and please stay tuned for the rest of the Techstrong TV lineup. It's gonna be awesome as usual. And we'll see you guys tomorrow.