December 4, 2023 • 34 mins
This episode includes some disturbing descriptions of sexual acts and assault. If you have kids around, you might want to use headphones. And please take care when listening.
Artificial intelligence and “generative AI” tools – think ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion – have become ingrained in our daily lives as a way to make aspects of work and life easier when used for its intended purpose. But many of them are open-source and widely available, giving users free rein to alter publicly available photos of people – including images taken from social media – to depict events that never happened in real life.
These images are called “deepfakes” and increasingly, they’re being altered in sexually explicit ways and posted online without consent. While the photos are fake, the harm inflicted is real.
Bloomberg’s Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy join this episode to describe the fallout when deepfake creators use AI to alter images and videos. Despite the harm to victims, there is little legal recourse under US law.
Read more: No Laws Protect People From Deepfake Porn. These Victims Fought Back
Listen to The Big Take podcast every weekday and subscribe to our daily newsletter: https://bloom.bg/3F3EJAK
Have questions or comments for Wes and the team? Reach us at bigtake@bloomberg.net.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
A note for listeners, this episode includes some disturbing descriptions
of sexual acts and assault. If you have kids around,
you might want to use headphones and please take care
when listening. If you've looked at headlines about Silicon Valley
at all in the past year, you've likely heard of
artificial intelligence and generative AI tools think chat, GPT, or
(00:22):
stable diffusion. They're touted as the next big thing, but
the use of these applications can have a dark side.
Many of them are open source and freely available, and
users are able to alter publicly available photos of people,
including images taken from social media, to depict events that
never happen in real life. These images are called deep fakes,
(00:44):
and oftentimes they're being altered in sexually explicit ways. While
the photos are fake, the harm is real. In many cases,
the victims are young people who don't know the images
exist until someone they know discovers them online. Bloomberg and
investigative reporter Olivia Carville went to a town in New
York where this happened.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
In terms of the impacts to the young woman, Nightmare
is one of them lost over twenty pounds from streets.
A number of them started carrying pepper spray in their handbags.
Two of them started carrying knives in their handbags, and
they still feel a sense of trauma from what happened.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
As awful as these photos can be, law enforcement and
victims have found it difficult to use the laws currently
on the books to bring the people making these images
to justice. Bloomberg cyber reporter Margie Murphy says prosecutors can
find themselves in a bind.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It's still incredibly blurry. A lot of people within law
enforcement that I spoke to you for the story all
said that it feels really mishmash at the moment between
state laws and federal laws, and that the law really
hasn't kept up with the technology in this area.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Olivia and Marghi are here to detail their business week investigation.
I'm Nancy Cook today. I'm the big take how AI
generated deep fake images are hurting real people. So Margie,
(02:18):
let's define the terms that we're going to talk about.
What is a deep fake photo?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
So a deep fake photo is a picture which has
been digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they
didn't and that's using a deep learning model, so artificial intelligence.
That's where the deep comes from. And so right now
today that would be using open Aiyes, Dolly is one
(02:43):
that you may have heard of. There's mid journey, there's
stable diffusion tools where you can basically ask a machine
to create an image that looks incredibly realistic, but it
never happened.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
And what is generative AI as you talk about it
in the.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Piece, the generative AI that we use at the moment
tends to be using text to image. So it's the
ability to kind of type in and say picture of
person eating an apple, and the machine can generate that
image for you, but you know, no photograph was ever taken,
but it looks incredibly real.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And Olivia, you open your piece with a chilling story
out of New York. Can you tell us what happened?
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Sure. So I work on Bloomberg's investigations team and had
been interested in deep fakes, I think for most of
the world. We came to learn about what a deep
fake image is from that iconic shot of the Pope
in a puffer jacket, and I did a lot of
research around deep fakes and then partner it up with
Margie and we decided to try and find a case
(03:48):
which illustrates just how damaging this technology can be, and
we found that case in Long Island, a suburb of
New York City. This is one of the first deep
fake related conviction in US history. And what happened here
is a young man decided to use software tools on
the Internet to manipulate doctor alter images of girls from
(04:12):
his high school. He targeted about forty different girls that
he went to school with and did so in very
horrific ways. In some cases, he digitally undressed them, He
put their faces onto the bodies of women engaging in
sex acts. He used photographs from when they were as
young as five years old. And this case really shows
(04:34):
us just how difficult it is to lay charges against
an individual who created fake or deep faked pornography.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And do we have an inkling about who was the
person responsible for this?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the case.
We felt is that the young woman who had been
targeted in these images actually investigated who was behind them
because they felt that authorities weren't doing enough to track
him down. The story really starts on New Year's Eve
twenty twenty, where a group of young women in Leavittown
(05:11):
came to discover photographs of them had been altered, manipulated,
turned pornographic and nature and uploaded to this website. The
website has a very graphic internet address name that's come
on printed picks dot com. And on New Year's Eve,
this group in Leavittown actually started discovering their images had
(05:32):
been uploaded to the site, and word got out. They
began messaging one another, sharing a link to the website
and discovered just how horrific some of these images and
the content that had gone up on this website had been.
In some cases, their poster was talking about raping and
murdering the girls. And so it was that New Year's
Eve that they first started reaching out to the police.
(05:53):
And throughout the course of twenty twenty one, the young
women themselves were investigating who was behind this, who had
uploaded all of their photos, altered them, turned them pornographic,
and posted them onto this website, and a lot of
them came to the conclusion that they knew who it was,
that they knew who the suspect was. They believed it
(06:13):
was a man that had attended school with them, a
former classmate, an actual friend of many of theirs as
well they recognized his handwriting and some of the images.
They recognized his writing style in some of the captions
on the website that he posted their images too. And
it was the young woman who actually took his name
(06:35):
to the police and said they believed he was behind
it all.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And Olivia, how old were these young women when this
happened and how old are they now?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Most of the young women were around eighteen or nineteen
years old when they discovered this website. It was the
year after they graduated from high school in Levettown, and
today they're around twenty two or twenty three years old.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Did they have a hard time getting the authorities involved
in this, including the local police, and making sure that
they knew it was a problem.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I think there was definitely a frustration that the police,
the families felt, at least, weren't moving fast enough to
try and do something about this case. It's important to
remember that cyber harassment cases or online vulgarity isn't really
high on police priority lists. In this example, you had
an individual who was creating fake images, and there's no
(07:33):
real law that says what he was doing was illegal.
So while it was grotesque and you'd look at the site,
and certainly the woman that I talked to were disgusted
by what they saw. But the difficulty is that there
are no laws in the US that said what this
young man was doing was actually illegal.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And Margie, can you explain how the new advances we've
heard about this past year in gener of AI are
making it easier to generate deep photos?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yes, so the new advances have just one improved the
look of these pictures, so they just look incredibly realistic
now in a way that a few years ago, when
we first started hearing about deep fake and deep fake pornography,
they just didn't quite look as convincing. And secondly, a
lot of the tools that have come out are open source,
which means it's really easy for people to download the model,
(08:28):
train the model themselves. A lot of the technologies, you know,
they've been created so you don't need super compute power
to process these models. The idea was to kind of
democratize them and make it so that everyone could use
their PC to kind of generate images and videos. Not
for bad necessarily, but of course with the Internet, there
(08:50):
are always people who will take these great technologies and
do horrible things with them, and so this open source
nature means that kind of once the cats out of
the bag, it's very difficult for people who develop these
technologies to put guardrails in place, and some of them have,
and they've been very upfront about talking about how, you know,
we're trying to help also do deep fake detection. So
(09:12):
once deep fakes are out there, we can say, oh, yes,
that was our tool, and you know, be careful that
isn't a real image. But once it's out there and
people have access to the core technology, they can remove
those guardrails and they can kind of do what they
want with them, which is why we've seen this rise
in deep fake pornography and this kind of cottage industry
(09:32):
that's emerged around undressing apps, which have just proliferated across
the Internet.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Olivia, you spoke to many of the women affected in
this New York case. What did they say about how
it impacted them and what they kept trying to do
to call attention to it.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I think one of the scariest things for some of
the women I spoke to was just how realistic those
images looked. They looked at the photo where they recall
taking it, and they were wearing a bikini or a
t shoe, but the image that had been uploaded to
this website, it showed them completely naked, and in some
cases the breasts that had been imposed on their bodies
(10:11):
were actually so realistic looking that they believed that other
people would think it was really them. And I think
that's what was one of the hardest parts for some
of the young women involved. In others, they were just scared,
to be honest, that was I think the biggest emotion
that came from the young woman that I talked to
was a fear of men, a fear of the internet.
(10:34):
Not only were their photos uploaded to this awful site,
but in some cases, the poster was actually encouraging users
of this site to reach out to the girls individually,
to contact them directly, so he posted their full names,
their addresses, their social media handles. I talked to a
(10:56):
lot of parents as well because of the sensitive nature
of the case, and the emotion I got was just
raw anger and also frustration that what happened took their
daughter's innocence away and they felt like they felt let
down by the authorities because of how long it took
(11:16):
to resolve the case and how challenging it was to
prosecute it because, through the eyes of the parents and
their daughters, this was a crime. They didn't care about
the nuances of the law or the fact that the
law hadn't caught up with the deep fake technology. What
they cared about was the fact that the prime suspect
was in their community and no one was doing anything
(11:37):
about it. So, in terms of the impacts to the
young woman nightmares, one of them lost over twenty pounds
from stress, A number of them started carrying pepper spray
in their handbags, two of them started carrying knives in
their handbags, and they still feel a sense of trauma
from what happened.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
When we're back why it's difficult for investigators to charge
a ledged perpetrators with a crime for creating and posting
deep bake images. Olivia, You've mentioned how hard it was
for police and these young women to actually figure out
(12:20):
who was behind posting the deep fakes. How long did
they suspect the person who was behind it and how
did they sort of figure that out?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Well, the young woman involved felt like they knew who
was behind it very shortly after discovering the website. Within days,
they had a suspect in their mind, and that was
Patrick Kerrey, a nineteen year old man who had attended
high school with them and was actually a friend of
a lot of the young women who were targeted. The
problem was there was no real evidence connecting Patrick Kerrey
(12:50):
to the website or to these posts. When he would
upload the photos, he would do so anonymously from usernames
like Siri, Jeinefeld or tween hunter. He never used his
real name or his real identity. And the challenge from
the police perspective, they didn't have enough evidence to get
(13:11):
a warrant out to subpoena his IP address to really
prove that he was the man behind this campaign, and
it would take a lot of effort from the police's
part to really investigate this case because unfortunately, there were
no laws that Carrie had broken by posting fake pornographic
images of these women.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
And Olivia, who was Ana and what did she have
to do with finding a break in this case?
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So Anna is a really popular cheerleader from General Douglas
MacArthur High School. She'd actually known Patrick Carrey from the
age of five years old. She lives a stone's throw
from his home and they went to the same elementary
school together. She grew increasingly frustrated throughout twenty twenty one
at the lack of response around the case and also
(14:00):
some of the disgusting things that were being posted about her.
There was one example where the harasser had included an
image that looked as though she had been murdered, and
he had posted it online with her full name and
some of her social media information, and she just felt
like she'd had enough, So in August of twenty twenty one,
(14:22):
she decided that she wanted to investigate who was behind
all this and to prove once and for all who
this cyber harasser was. She'd heard rumors and speculation that
Patrick Carey was behind it, and she didn't believe that
he could do something like this, so she wanted to
not only unmask the predator, but she also wanted to
clear Carrie's name, and she decided to do this by
(14:45):
actually doing a deep dive into every single photo the
poster had uploaded to this website. She studied them. She
looked into the background of the images to see if
she could find any evidence that could help her identify
who this person was, and there was one part taricular
photo she saw where he had posted an image from
a little girl's bedroom and he was actually wearing little
(15:06):
girl's underwear. This told her that he had access to
a young girl's bedroom, and she looked in the background
of the image and she saw a white dresser with
brown trim. She saw a soft toy animal on the beard,
and she decided that she would then search for Patrick
Carrey's younger sisters. Having grown up very close to his
(15:26):
home in attending elementary school with him, she knew that
he had twin sisters, her a number of years younger,
and she started looking for them online to see if
she could find any social media presence, and she actually
found one of his sisters posting TikTok videos from exactly
the same bedroom. It had the same dresser with the
same brown trim, the same soft toy animal on the beard,
(15:46):
and that's when she realized that a person that she
believed was a friend of hers, a classmate, someone whod
she's known for almost her entire life, was behind all this.
She took that evidence into the police station in late August,
and it was September fifth that Patrick carry was arrested.
The lead detective on the case actually went over to
(16:08):
Carrie's house, knocked on the door with some of the
print outs of this particular website and some of the
posts that had been made, and he began reading them
out aloud to carry who was at home with his mother,
and he admitted that he was behind it all.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Prosecutors say Carrie created fourteen different profiles posting these deep
faked images from August twenty nineteen to September of this year.
When he was arrested.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
He had been charged with low level harassment violations and obscenity,
which is a pretty old school charge that was really
the prosecutors didn't feel like it was going to stick,
so they had ninety days to raise the stakes. And
they told me that the case had come through as
an on call, which in their department at least, that
meant that the police were hoping the prosecutors would upgrade
(16:57):
or update or file new charges again to Carrie, because
they weren't really sure what to charge him with.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And we should say, you reached out to Patrick Carey
for comment and he didn't respond to you. You spoke
to the district attorneys in this case. What did they
say about what it takes to charge someone for posting
deep fake photos.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
The two district attorneys that actually handled and investigated this
case were really surprised when it landed on their desk
and they realized, you know, the depravity of some of
the content, just how disgusting some of these posts were,
and the fact that there were no real charges that
they could lay against this individual. I remember one of
the district attorneys telling me that she was scared that
(17:39):
reading through some of Carrie's posts, she was afraid that
this behavior could go offline, as in he could commit
real crimes in the real world, not just as an
anonymous predator online. So she wanted to ensure that they
could raise the stakes on the charges that have been
filed against Carrie. But the challenge they really.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
As there were no charges.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
There was no charge that they could turn to that
said it was illegal to post fake pornographic content of
young women on the Internet, so they had to get creative.
They studied the penal code, They read through every page,
They looked at every single photo that Carrie had uploaded
to this website, studied the background of the images, studied
(18:23):
what was in the images, and finally, on October fifth,
they found a crack in the case, which is they
found one real nude image of a fourteen year old
girl's genitals. That meant that Patrick Carey had posted child
sexual abuse material online and that was prosecutable. So the
(18:43):
charges were upgraded to see SAM charges.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And see SAM here were referring to child sexual abuse materials.
So marguie briefly, what laws are out there now in
the US the cover photo sharing, what's protected and what's illegal.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
So that currently no federal law that criminalizes the sharing
of fake pornographic images in the US. That doesn't mean
that someone sharing these kind of images won't be prosecuted
because there are varying state laws under kind of revenge porn.
There are new bills that are being brought in about
deep fake images, but there isn't this strict federal law.
(19:22):
So this is why we had these issues with the
prosecutors when it comes to children. So child sexual abuse
material that is banned. So there is a federal law
saying that you cannot generate child sexual abuse material. However,
it's a narrow law and the problem is that a
lot of these ai generations of children are just nude images,
(19:44):
which you wouldn't prosecute someone who's posted a picture of
a child in the bath or on the beach, and
in the same way, there isn't a precedent for prosecuting
anyone who generates an image of a new child, So
there has to be a very explicit abuse being to
picted in the image, which is kind of given a
lot of people credence to just had the misfortune of
(20:07):
looking at a lot of forums where people are sharing
tips on how to generate these kind of images. You
can see in the comments that they feel quite emboldened
by this law, so it's still incredibly blurry. A lot
of people within law enforcement that I spoke to for
the story all said that it feels really mishmash at
the moment between state laws and federal laws, and that
(20:30):
the law really hasn't kept up with the technology in
this area.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
At the same time the young women and prosecutors in
New York were trying to track down who was posting
these deep bakes, there were other people investigating this site
who were they.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
For a few years actually, there had been a group
of people who had had similar experiences as those girls
in Levittown, victims who had had their pictures posted or
simply just people who had heard of the web site
and were repulsed by it. And what we've found out
was one of the key people in investigating the website
(21:08):
was Will Wallace, who's a former police officer who's living
in New Zealand and had been working for years on
trying to uncover some of the users for similar reasons
as the levitt Town women.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
I think, for me, the craziest part of the reporting
process of this story was that moment that we realized
this vigilante movement to shut down come On Printed Picks
coincided with the investigation that the young woman from Levittown
were doing to try and identify their harasser. I remember
I was driving back from Leavittown to New York City.
(21:43):
It was late at night, it was raining, and I
called Margie and had her on speakerphone, and I was
telling her everything I'd learned from an interview, my first
interview with Anna, where she described how she actually discovered
Patrick Carey was behind this website. And Margie jumps back
in and tells me that there's been a vigilante movement
of trolls and hackers in a former police detective from
(22:06):
New Zealand, which happens to be where I'm from that
had been involved in trying to shut this website down
for the past two or three years.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
He had been tipped off by former police colleagues that
there was a case they couldn't crack a woman who
had received years of abuse from people sending her pictures
of her photos next to their genitalia. They were sending
it to her parents, to her boyfriend that caused the
end of her relationship. And after he'd done one case,
he just got a kind of obsession with the website
(22:37):
because he couldn't believe that it was still up and running.
He was adamant that he could find out who was
behind this file site, and he kept trying to alert journalists,
he was alerting law enforcement in different parts of the world,
and he was just getting nowhere. And so after months
(22:58):
and months of frustration, he decided to look into the
admin himself to try and put some heat on him,
and he decided to publish a blog exposing who was
behind it and detailing his investigation into how he uncovered her.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
It was. We were both just so shocked and surprised,
because in journalism you always hope that the stars are
going to a line, and that you can have an
intersecting narrative of two different stories happening at the same time,
but it never really happens, and it did in this story.
We could explain to readers not only what happened in
Leavettown in this one very specific case, but the broader
(23:37):
global picture of a group of online vigilantes who were
targeting this website, joining forces digitally from around the world
to shut it down.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And you spoke to Will Wallace about the apparent administrator
of the site, scatran Costa, and what Will did to
try to get the sait taken down.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Here's well, it wasn't likely that law enforcement were going
to intervene at that. It was pretty much sort of
chasing Scott round the Internet and finding out who the
providers were and reporting him to the providers. There's so
many services at someone's fingertips that it is quite easy,
particularly if you have the skills and knowledge, just to
shift to a different provider. That is one of the
(24:17):
issues where it's kind of people on the Internet having
a go at getting rid of a website, is that
you're always going to be doing that, Whereas with law
enforcement intervention, they have a lot more levers they can pull.
I don't know if it will end. I don't know
if the service will ever get taken down, but at
least I feel as though I've done my bit, and
that's to create more accountability.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
After the break, the outcome of the Levittown case and
why AI technology keeps out pacing regulation, Olivia. In an
interview later on with one of New York's das, you
found out that there was more to the story with
(25:02):
Carrie's deep fakes. What happened?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah, So this interview was done in the Nassau County Courthouse.
I was talking to both of the district attorneys who
had been involved and investigated this case, Kelsey Laura and
Melissa Scannell, and we were talking through their investigative process
and how they came to increase the charges against Carrie,
how they investigated what really happened, and I recall towards
(25:28):
the end of the interview, I asked them if they'd
ever contacted the administrator or owner of the website or
tried to get the girl's photos removed, and they told
me that after his conviction, there was one final task
they wanted to do, which was to reach out to
the person behind this horrific website and ask them to
(25:48):
remove all photos and all posts that Carrie had ever
made associated with his usernames. They were going to do
that by sending the administrator Carrie's certificate of conviction and
saying these hosts resulted in criminal conduct, please remove them all.
But when they went to do that, the website was offline.
So just days earlier, William Wallace and the Vigilantes mission
(26:10):
had been successful when this website had gone dark, so
the district attorneys felt like there wasn't really any more
that they needed to do. The photos had been removed,
the posts were no longer there. But during that interview
I informed them that actually this website had moved to
a different domain, a different URL, and all of the
posts of the Levittown Girls were back up online and visible.
(26:35):
And I remember Melissagists her jaw dropped, and she was
so angry and also shocked and confused at the same time.
And she was speaking very eloquently and calmly throughout the interview,
and she just stopped and said, what what do you
mean They're still there?
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And Marguie, did anyone associated with running any of these
sites respond to you when you can't them.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
They did after a long while. We did a lot
to try and contact Scott Trent Coster. It took a
few months and eventually they responded to a kind of
long email where we asked a lot of questions and
laid out the story and that we were going to
name them, and they called me a weirdo, which is
(27:22):
one of the strangest responses I've ever had. They pointed
out that it was very strange for me to want
to name anyone and that I should not be focusing
my time on exposing someone's identity. We know that the
admin has spoken to some of the vigilantes before and
they have had similar responses, very odd responses like why
(27:44):
are you trying to ruin my business for me? You
should just leave us alone? What's wrong with us having
our kinks?
Speaker 1 (27:52):
And Olivia, where is Patrick carry now?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
He was sentenced to six months in prison, ten years
probation in lifetime sentence as a sex offender. This means
he can't own a smartphone, he can't own a device
with a camera, He can't live within a thousand feet
or be within a thousand feet of a school or
a playground or a place where children are, and surprisingly,
in August I found out he'd actually been released after
(28:16):
four months with time off for good behavior, and he's
back in Livetown. One of the young women who open
our story Cecilia Luce. She was driving along the street
and she saw him walking down one of Levittown's main drags.
He had on a brown hoodie, he had headphones in,
and she started immediately crying. She was so scared to
(28:36):
see him, And then as she drove on, she felt anger,
and she decided to stop and turn her car round
and go back. She wanted to confront him, she wanted
to yell at him. She had been a close friend
of Patrick Carrey's throughout high school. So she did a
U turn, turned to her car, back around, and he
had disappeared. She carried on driving for a number of minutes,
looking down all the side streets to see where he
(28:58):
would have gone, but she never saw him again. At
is sentencing, one of the young women I talked to
actually read out a victim impact statement. Her name is
Kayla Michelle, and she was the only young woman who
testified at his sentencing. She described attending every single hearing,
relating to this case. I think for a few reasons.
(29:19):
One of them is because she'd known Carrie since she
was eight years old, she thought he was a friend
of hers. And another reason is that she was just
so angry at him and she wanted to ensure that
justice was going to be served. So during my interview
with Kayla, who is now twenty three and still lives
in Leavertown, we talked about the moment that she actually
(29:41):
had the courage and bravery to read out this victim
impact statement in court, and she described to me how
nervous she was, that she'd written down what she wanted
to say and the piece of paper was shaking in
her hands, that she had to take three deep breaths
before she was strong enough to talk, and that she
looked directly at Patrick Carry in court and he refused
(30:02):
to make eye contact with her. I reached out to
one of the court reporters who were in court that
day in order to get a full transcript of what
Kayla said, and this was what was read out in court.
Kayla said, I'm the strongest person in the room because
I'm looking you directly in the face to tell you
that you discussed me. You hurt me, but you've also
(30:23):
changed me. You had the audacity to talk to me
through social media, joke with me, and try to be
cordial with me while behind my back belittling me, putting
me down, sexualizing my younger self and body. You completely
change the way that I viewed myself and my body,
and for that, I'll never forgive you. Your name will
(30:43):
forever give me nightmares and haunt me. I hear your
name and I feel sick.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Marguie, What is needed legally to prevent the further spread
of these sites and AI generated photos?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
That is just such a hard question. You know, we're
talking about this story. This isn't the first, and I'm
it's the first we're hearing of, but I think there'll
be many similar stories like this because the law is
tricky and we're really catching up with what technology is
able to do. And also there is an issue with
who is liable who is accountable for this, So it's
(31:20):
not just the users of the technology who are generating
these images. They then have the ability to post them online,
and then the owners of these websites aren't really liable
under Section two thirty, which means that as a a
website or blog. If a user is posting something that's criminal,
they're not going to be held liable for it, but
(31:41):
they're enabling this whole forum for thousands of images to
be uploaded.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
I think that the reason why their question is so
hard goes back to their age old Silicon Valley mantra
of move fast and break things, where this technology was
rolled out before legislators, regulators, the public really understood its power.
So now as we're seeing states trying to catch up
to these new tools, they're creating new laws that As
(32:12):
Maggie and I reported, we looked across the United States
and saw all the different portions of legislation that have
been created to try and target deep fakes. But we've
got a patchwork across the country now. Some states have
civil statutes, some have criminal statutes, Some only target election
related deep fake content, which is a subject we haven't
(32:32):
even had time to address on today's podcast. But other
statutes are just amendments to existing revenge porn laws. So
no one's really figured out the right way to solve
this problem yet. In October, we saw President Biden announce
a new executive order to target artificial intelligence and ensure
that it was illegal that you couldn't use these tools
(32:54):
to create child sexual abuse imagery, child porn, or intimate
imagery of individuals doing things that they never really did.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
And we don't.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Actually know when these are going to be implemented or
how they are going to be implemented. You know, that's
the big question right now.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Olivia Marghi, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Us, Thanks for having us, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more
shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Bloomberg CarPlay,
or wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you.
Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at
Bloomberg dot net. Our supervising producer is Vicky Vergalina. Our
(33:41):
senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falerro
and Moe Barrow. Raphael I'm see Lee is our engineer.
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. I'm Nancy Cook.
We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take
Speaker 3 (34:00):
The Dot Bun, the Don Staple Bar
A note for listeners, this episode includes some disturbing descriptions
of sexual acts and assault. If you have kids around,
you might want to use headphones and please take care
when listening. If you've looked at headlines about Silicon Valley
at all in the past year, you've likely heard of
artificial intelligence and generative AI tools think chat, GPT, or
(00:22):
stable diffusion. They're touted as the next big thing, but
the use of these applications can have a dark side.
Many of them are open source and freely available, and
users are able to alter publicly available photos of people,
including images taken from social media, to depict events that
never happen in real life. These images are called deep fakes,
(00:44):
and oftentimes they're being altered in sexually explicit ways. While
the photos are fake, the harm is real. In many cases,
the victims are young people who don't know the images
exist until someone they know discovers them online. Bloomberg and
investigative reporter Olivia Carville went to a town in New
York where this happened.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
In terms of the impacts to the young woman, Nightmare
is one of them lost over twenty pounds from streets.
A number of them started carrying pepper spray in their handbags.
Two of them started carrying knives in their handbags, and
they still feel a sense of trauma from what happened.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
As awful as these photos can be, law enforcement and
victims have found it difficult to use the laws currently
on the books to bring the people making these images
to justice. Bloomberg cyber reporter Margie Murphy says prosecutors can
find themselves in a bind.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It's still incredibly blurry. A lot of people within law
enforcement that I spoke to you for the story all
said that it feels really mishmash at the moment between
state laws and federal laws, and that the law really
hasn't kept up with the technology in this area.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Olivia and Marghi are here to detail their business week investigation.
I'm Nancy Cook today. I'm the big take how AI
generated deep fake images are hurting real people. So Margie,
(02:18):
let's define the terms that we're going to talk about.
What is a deep fake photo?
Speaker 3 (02:23):
So a deep fake photo is a picture which has
been digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they
didn't and that's using a deep learning model, so artificial intelligence.
That's where the deep comes from. And so right now
today that would be using open Aiyes, Dolly is one
(02:43):
that you may have heard of. There's mid journey, there's
stable diffusion tools where you can basically ask a machine
to create an image that looks incredibly realistic, but it
never happened.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
And what is generative AI as you talk about it
in the.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Piece, the generative AI that we use at the moment
tends to be using text to image. So it's the
ability to kind of type in and say picture of
person eating an apple, and the machine can generate that
image for you, but you know, no photograph was ever taken,
but it looks incredibly real.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And Olivia, you open your piece with a chilling story
out of New York. Can you tell us what happened?
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Sure. So I work on Bloomberg's investigations team and had
been interested in deep fakes, I think for most of
the world. We came to learn about what a deep
fake image is from that iconic shot of the Pope
in a puffer jacket, and I did a lot of
research around deep fakes and then partner it up with
Margie and we decided to try and find a case
(03:48):
which illustrates just how damaging this technology can be, and
we found that case in Long Island, a suburb of
New York City. This is one of the first deep
fake related conviction in US history. And what happened here
is a young man decided to use software tools on
the Internet to manipulate doctor alter images of girls from
(04:12):
his high school. He targeted about forty different girls that
he went to school with and did so in very
horrific ways. In some cases, he digitally undressed them, He
put their faces onto the bodies of women engaging in
sex acts. He used photographs from when they were as
young as five years old. And this case really shows
(04:34):
us just how difficult it is to lay charges against
an individual who created fake or deep faked pornography.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
And do we have an inkling about who was the
person responsible for this?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the case.
We felt is that the young woman who had been
targeted in these images actually investigated who was behind them
because they felt that authorities weren't doing enough to track
him down. The story really starts on New Year's Eve
twenty twenty, where a group of young women in Leavittown
(05:11):
came to discover photographs of them had been altered, manipulated,
turned pornographic and nature and uploaded to this website. The
website has a very graphic internet address name that's come
on printed picks dot com. And on New Year's Eve,
this group in Leavittown actually started discovering their images had
(05:32):
been uploaded to the site, and word got out. They
began messaging one another, sharing a link to the website
and discovered just how horrific some of these images and
the content that had gone up on this website had been.
In some cases, their poster was talking about raping and
murdering the girls. And so it was that New Year's
Eve that they first started reaching out to the police.
(05:53):
And throughout the course of twenty twenty one, the young
women themselves were investigating who was behind this, who had
uploaded all of their photos, altered them, turned them pornographic,
and posted them onto this website, and a lot of
them came to the conclusion that they knew who it was,
that they knew who the suspect was. They believed it
(06:13):
was a man that had attended school with them, a
former classmate, an actual friend of many of theirs as
well they recognized his handwriting and some of the images.
They recognized his writing style in some of the captions
on the website that he posted their images too. And
it was the young woman who actually took his name
(06:35):
to the police and said they believed he was behind
it all.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And Olivia, how old were these young women when this
happened and how old are they now?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Most of the young women were around eighteen or nineteen
years old when they discovered this website. It was the
year after they graduated from high school in Levettown, and
today they're around twenty two or twenty three years old.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Did they have a hard time getting the authorities involved
in this, including the local police, and making sure that
they knew it was a problem.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
I think there was definitely a frustration that the police,
the families felt, at least, weren't moving fast enough to
try and do something about this case. It's important to
remember that cyber harassment cases or online vulgarity isn't really
high on police priority lists. In this example, you had
an individual who was creating fake images, and there's no
(07:33):
real law that says what he was doing was illegal.
So while it was grotesque and you'd look at the site,
and certainly the woman that I talked to were disgusted
by what they saw. But the difficulty is that there
are no laws in the US that said what this
young man was doing was actually illegal.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And Margie, can you explain how the new advances we've
heard about this past year in gener of AI are
making it easier to generate deep photos?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yes, so the new advances have just one improved the
look of these pictures, so they just look incredibly realistic
now in a way that a few years ago, when
we first started hearing about deep fake and deep fake pornography,
they just didn't quite look as convincing. And secondly, a
lot of the tools that have come out are open source,
which means it's really easy for people to download the model,
(08:28):
train the model themselves. A lot of the technologies, you know,
they've been created so you don't need super compute power
to process these models. The idea was to kind of
democratize them and make it so that everyone could use
their PC to kind of generate images and videos. Not
for bad necessarily, but of course with the Internet, there
(08:50):
are always people who will take these great technologies and
do horrible things with them, and so this open source
nature means that kind of once the cats out of
the bag, it's very difficult for people who develop these
technologies to put guardrails in place, and some of them have,
and they've been very upfront about talking about how, you know,
we're trying to help also do deep fake detection. So
(09:12):
once deep fakes are out there, we can say, oh, yes,
that was our tool, and you know, be careful that
isn't a real image. But once it's out there and
people have access to the core technology, they can remove
those guardrails and they can kind of do what they
want with them, which is why we've seen this rise
in deep fake pornography and this kind of cottage industry
(09:32):
that's emerged around undressing apps, which have just proliferated across
the Internet.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Olivia, you spoke to many of the women affected in
this New York case. What did they say about how
it impacted them and what they kept trying to do
to call attention to it.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I think one of the scariest things for some of
the women I spoke to was just how realistic those
images looked. They looked at the photo where they recall
taking it, and they were wearing a bikini or a
t shoe, but the image that had been uploaded to
this website, it showed them completely naked, and in some
cases the breasts that had been imposed on their bodies
(10:11):
were actually so realistic looking that they believed that other
people would think it was really them. And I think
that's what was one of the hardest parts for some
of the young women involved. In others, they were just scared,
to be honest, that was I think the biggest emotion
that came from the young woman that I talked to
was a fear of men, a fear of the internet.
(10:34):
Not only were their photos uploaded to this awful site,
but in some cases, the poster was actually encouraging users
of this site to reach out to the girls individually,
to contact them directly, so he posted their full names,
their addresses, their social media handles. I talked to a
(10:56):
lot of parents as well because of the sensitive nature
of the case, and the emotion I got was just
raw anger and also frustration that what happened took their
daughter's innocence away and they felt like they felt let
down by the authorities because of how long it took
(11:16):
to resolve the case and how challenging it was to
prosecute it because, through the eyes of the parents and
their daughters, this was a crime. They didn't care about
the nuances of the law or the fact that the
law hadn't caught up with the deep fake technology. What
they cared about was the fact that the prime suspect
was in their community and no one was doing anything
(11:37):
about it. So, in terms of the impacts to the
young woman nightmares, one of them lost over twenty pounds
from stress, A number of them started carrying pepper spray
in their handbags, two of them started carrying knives in
their handbags, and they still feel a sense of trauma
from what happened.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
When we're back why it's difficult for investigators to charge
a ledged perpetrators with a crime for creating and posting
deep bake images. Olivia, You've mentioned how hard it was
for police and these young women to actually figure out
(12:20):
who was behind posting the deep fakes. How long did
they suspect the person who was behind it and how
did they sort of figure that out?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Well, the young woman involved felt like they knew who
was behind it very shortly after discovering the website. Within days,
they had a suspect in their mind, and that was
Patrick Kerrey, a nineteen year old man who had attended
high school with them and was actually a friend of
a lot of the young women who were targeted. The
problem was there was no real evidence connecting Patrick Kerrey
(12:50):
to the website or to these posts. When he would
upload the photos, he would do so anonymously from usernames
like Siri, Jeinefeld or tween hunter. He never used his
real name or his real identity. And the challenge from
the police perspective, they didn't have enough evidence to get
(13:11):
a warrant out to subpoena his IP address to really
prove that he was the man behind this campaign, and
it would take a lot of effort from the police's
part to really investigate this case because unfortunately, there were
no laws that Carrie had broken by posting fake pornographic
images of these women.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
And Olivia, who was Ana and what did she have
to do with finding a break in this case?
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So Anna is a really popular cheerleader from General Douglas
MacArthur High School. She'd actually known Patrick Carrey from the
age of five years old. She lives a stone's throw
from his home and they went to the same elementary
school together. She grew increasingly frustrated throughout twenty twenty one
at the lack of response around the case and also
(14:00):
some of the disgusting things that were being posted about her.
There was one example where the harasser had included an
image that looked as though she had been murdered, and
he had posted it online with her full name and
some of her social media information, and she just felt
like she'd had enough, So in August of twenty twenty one,
(14:22):
she decided that she wanted to investigate who was behind
all this and to prove once and for all who
this cyber harasser was. She'd heard rumors and speculation that
Patrick Carey was behind it, and she didn't believe that
he could do something like this, so she wanted to
not only unmask the predator, but she also wanted to
clear Carrie's name, and she decided to do this by
(14:45):
actually doing a deep dive into every single photo the
poster had uploaded to this website. She studied them. She
looked into the background of the images to see if
she could find any evidence that could help her identify
who this person was, and there was one part taricular
photo she saw where he had posted an image from
a little girl's bedroom and he was actually wearing little
(15:06):
girl's underwear. This told her that he had access to
a young girl's bedroom, and she looked in the background
of the image and she saw a white dresser with
brown trim. She saw a soft toy animal on the beard,
and she decided that she would then search for Patrick
Carrey's younger sisters. Having grown up very close to his
(15:26):
home in attending elementary school with him, she knew that
he had twin sisters, her a number of years younger,
and she started looking for them online to see if
she could find any social media presence, and she actually
found one of his sisters posting TikTok videos from exactly
the same bedroom. It had the same dresser with the
same brown trim, the same soft toy animal on the beard,
(15:46):
and that's when she realized that a person that she
believed was a friend of hers, a classmate, someone whod
she's known for almost her entire life, was behind all this.
She took that evidence into the police station in late August,
and it was September fifth that Patrick carry was arrested.
The lead detective on the case actually went over to
(16:08):
Carrie's house, knocked on the door with some of the
print outs of this particular website and some of the
posts that had been made, and he began reading them
out aloud to carry who was at home with his mother,
and he admitted that he was behind it all.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Prosecutors say Carrie created fourteen different profiles posting these deep
faked images from August twenty nineteen to September of this year.
When he was arrested.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
He had been charged with low level harassment violations and obscenity,
which is a pretty old school charge that was really
the prosecutors didn't feel like it was going to stick,
so they had ninety days to raise the stakes. And
they told me that the case had come through as
an on call, which in their department at least, that
meant that the police were hoping the prosecutors would upgrade
(16:57):
or update or file new charges again to Carrie, because
they weren't really sure what to charge him with.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And we should say, you reached out to Patrick Carey
for comment and he didn't respond to you. You spoke
to the district attorneys in this case. What did they
say about what it takes to charge someone for posting
deep fake photos.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
The two district attorneys that actually handled and investigated this
case were really surprised when it landed on their desk
and they realized, you know, the depravity of some of
the content, just how disgusting some of these posts were,
and the fact that there were no real charges that
they could lay against this individual. I remember one of
the district attorneys telling me that she was scared that
(17:39):
reading through some of Carrie's posts, she was afraid that
this behavior could go offline, as in he could commit
real crimes in the real world, not just as an
anonymous predator online. So she wanted to ensure that they
could raise the stakes on the charges that have been
filed against Carrie. But the challenge they really.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
As there were no charges.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
There was no charge that they could turn to that
said it was illegal to post fake pornographic content of
young women on the Internet, so they had to get creative.
They studied the penal code, They read through every page,
They looked at every single photo that Carrie had uploaded
to this website, studied the background of the images, studied
(18:23):
what was in the images, and finally, on October fifth,
they found a crack in the case, which is they
found one real nude image of a fourteen year old
girl's genitals. That meant that Patrick Carey had posted child
sexual abuse material online and that was prosecutable. So the
(18:43):
charges were upgraded to see SAM charges.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And see SAM here were referring to child sexual abuse materials.
So marguie briefly, what laws are out there now in
the US the cover photo sharing, what's protected and what's illegal.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
So that currently no federal law that criminalizes the sharing
of fake pornographic images in the US. That doesn't mean
that someone sharing these kind of images won't be prosecuted
because there are varying state laws under kind of revenge porn.
There are new bills that are being brought in about
deep fake images, but there isn't this strict federal law.
(19:22):
So this is why we had these issues with the
prosecutors when it comes to children. So child sexual abuse
material that is banned. So there is a federal law
saying that you cannot generate child sexual abuse material. However,
it's a narrow law and the problem is that a
lot of these ai generations of children are just nude images,
(19:44):
which you wouldn't prosecute someone who's posted a picture of
a child in the bath or on the beach, and
in the same way, there isn't a precedent for prosecuting
anyone who generates an image of a new child, So
there has to be a very explicit abuse being to
picted in the image, which is kind of given a
lot of people credence to just had the misfortune of
(20:07):
looking at a lot of forums where people are sharing
tips on how to generate these kind of images. You
can see in the comments that they feel quite emboldened
by this law, so it's still incredibly blurry. A lot
of people within law enforcement that I spoke to for
the story all said that it feels really mishmash at
the moment between state laws and federal laws, and that
(20:30):
the law really hasn't kept up with the technology in
this area.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
At the same time the young women and prosecutors in
New York were trying to track down who was posting
these deep bakes, there were other people investigating this site
who were they.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
For a few years actually, there had been a group
of people who had had similar experiences as those girls
in Levittown, victims who had had their pictures posted or
simply just people who had heard of the web site
and were repulsed by it. And what we've found out
was one of the key people in investigating the website
(21:08):
was Will Wallace, who's a former police officer who's living
in New Zealand and had been working for years on
trying to uncover some of the users for similar reasons
as the levitt Town women.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
I think, for me, the craziest part of the reporting
process of this story was that moment that we realized
this vigilante movement to shut down come On Printed Picks
coincided with the investigation that the young woman from Levittown
were doing to try and identify their harasser. I remember
I was driving back from Leavittown to New York City.
(21:43):
It was late at night, it was raining, and I
called Margie and had her on speakerphone, and I was
telling her everything I'd learned from an interview, my first
interview with Anna, where she described how she actually discovered
Patrick Carey was behind this website. And Margie jumps back
in and tells me that there's been a vigilante movement
of trolls and hackers in a former police detective from
(22:06):
New Zealand, which happens to be where I'm from that
had been involved in trying to shut this website down
for the past two or three years.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
He had been tipped off by former police colleagues that
there was a case they couldn't crack a woman who
had received years of abuse from people sending her pictures
of her photos next to their genitalia. They were sending
it to her parents, to her boyfriend that caused the
end of her relationship. And after he'd done one case,
he just got a kind of obsession with the website
(22:37):
because he couldn't believe that it was still up and running.
He was adamant that he could find out who was
behind this file site, and he kept trying to alert journalists,
he was alerting law enforcement in different parts of the world,
and he was just getting nowhere. And so after months
(22:58):
and months of frustration, he decided to look into the
admin himself to try and put some heat on him,
and he decided to publish a blog exposing who was
behind it and detailing his investigation into how he uncovered her.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
It was. We were both just so shocked and surprised,
because in journalism you always hope that the stars are
going to a line, and that you can have an
intersecting narrative of two different stories happening at the same time,
but it never really happens, and it did in this story.
We could explain to readers not only what happened in
Leavettown in this one very specific case, but the broader
(23:37):
global picture of a group of online vigilantes who were
targeting this website, joining forces digitally from around the world
to shut it down.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And you spoke to Will Wallace about the apparent administrator
of the site, scatran Costa, and what Will did to
try to get the sait taken down.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Here's well, it wasn't likely that law enforcement were going
to intervene at that. It was pretty much sort of
chasing Scott round the Internet and finding out who the
providers were and reporting him to the providers. There's so
many services at someone's fingertips that it is quite easy,
particularly if you have the skills and knowledge, just to
shift to a different provider. That is one of the
(24:17):
issues where it's kind of people on the Internet having
a go at getting rid of a website, is that
you're always going to be doing that, Whereas with law
enforcement intervention, they have a lot more levers they can pull.
I don't know if it will end. I don't know
if the service will ever get taken down, but at
least I feel as though I've done my bit, and
that's to create more accountability.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
After the break, the outcome of the Levittown case and
why AI technology keeps out pacing regulation, Olivia. In an
interview later on with one of New York's das, you
found out that there was more to the story with
(25:02):
Carrie's deep fakes. What happened?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah, So this interview was done in the Nassau County Courthouse.
I was talking to both of the district attorneys who
had been involved and investigated this case, Kelsey Laura and
Melissa Scannell, and we were talking through their investigative process
and how they came to increase the charges against Carrie,
how they investigated what really happened, and I recall towards
(25:28):
the end of the interview, I asked them if they'd
ever contacted the administrator or owner of the website or
tried to get the girl's photos removed, and they told
me that after his conviction, there was one final task
they wanted to do, which was to reach out to
the person behind this horrific website and ask them to
(25:48):
remove all photos and all posts that Carrie had ever
made associated with his usernames. They were going to do
that by sending the administrator Carrie's certificate of conviction and
saying these hosts resulted in criminal conduct, please remove them all.
But when they went to do that, the website was offline.
So just days earlier, William Wallace and the Vigilantes mission
(26:10):
had been successful when this website had gone dark, so
the district attorneys felt like there wasn't really any more
that they needed to do. The photos had been removed,
the posts were no longer there. But during that interview
I informed them that actually this website had moved to
a different domain, a different URL, and all of the
posts of the Levittown Girls were back up online and visible.
(26:35):
And I remember Melissagists her jaw dropped, and she was
so angry and also shocked and confused at the same time.
And she was speaking very eloquently and calmly throughout the interview,
and she just stopped and said, what what do you
mean They're still there?
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And Marguie, did anyone associated with running any of these
sites respond to you when you can't them.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
They did after a long while. We did a lot
to try and contact Scott Trent Coster. It took a
few months and eventually they responded to a kind of
long email where we asked a lot of questions and
laid out the story and that we were going to
name them, and they called me a weirdo, which is
(27:22):
one of the strangest responses I've ever had. They pointed
out that it was very strange for me to want
to name anyone and that I should not be focusing
my time on exposing someone's identity. We know that the
admin has spoken to some of the vigilantes before and
they have had similar responses, very odd responses like why
(27:44):
are you trying to ruin my business for me? You
should just leave us alone? What's wrong with us having
our kinks?
Speaker 1 (27:52):
And Olivia, where is Patrick carry now?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
He was sentenced to six months in prison, ten years
probation in lifetime sentence as a sex offender. This means
he can't own a smartphone, he can't own a device
with a camera, He can't live within a thousand feet
or be within a thousand feet of a school or
a playground or a place where children are, and surprisingly,
in August I found out he'd actually been released after
(28:16):
four months with time off for good behavior, and he's
back in Livetown. One of the young women who open
our story Cecilia Luce. She was driving along the street
and she saw him walking down one of Levittown's main drags.
He had on a brown hoodie, he had headphones in,
and she started immediately crying. She was so scared to
(28:36):
see him, And then as she drove on, she felt anger,
and she decided to stop and turn her car round
and go back. She wanted to confront him, she wanted
to yell at him. She had been a close friend
of Patrick Carrey's throughout high school. So she did a
U turn, turned to her car, back around, and he
had disappeared. She carried on driving for a number of minutes,
looking down all the side streets to see where he
(28:58):
would have gone, but she never saw him again. At
is sentencing, one of the young women I talked to
actually read out a victim impact statement. Her name is
Kayla Michelle, and she was the only young woman who
testified at his sentencing. She described attending every single hearing,
relating to this case. I think for a few reasons.
(29:19):
One of them is because she'd known Carrie since she
was eight years old, she thought he was a friend
of hers. And another reason is that she was just
so angry at him and she wanted to ensure that
justice was going to be served. So during my interview
with Kayla, who is now twenty three and still lives
in Leavertown, we talked about the moment that she actually
(29:41):
had the courage and bravery to read out this victim
impact statement in court, and she described to me how
nervous she was, that she'd written down what she wanted
to say and the piece of paper was shaking in
her hands, that she had to take three deep breaths
before she was strong enough to talk, and that she
looked directly at Patrick Carry in court and he refused
(30:02):
to make eye contact with her. I reached out to
one of the court reporters who were in court that
day in order to get a full transcript of what
Kayla said, and this was what was read out in court.
Kayla said, I'm the strongest person in the room because
I'm looking you directly in the face to tell you
that you discussed me. You hurt me, but you've also
(30:23):
changed me. You had the audacity to talk to me
through social media, joke with me, and try to be
cordial with me while behind my back belittling me, putting
me down, sexualizing my younger self and body. You completely
change the way that I viewed myself and my body,
and for that, I'll never forgive you. Your name will
(30:43):
forever give me nightmares and haunt me. I hear your
name and I feel sick.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Marguie, What is needed legally to prevent the further spread
of these sites and AI generated photos?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
That is just such a hard question. You know, we're
talking about this story. This isn't the first, and I'm
it's the first we're hearing of, but I think there'll
be many similar stories like this because the law is
tricky and we're really catching up with what technology is
able to do. And also there is an issue with
who is liable who is accountable for this, So it's
(31:20):
not just the users of the technology who are generating
these images. They then have the ability to post them online,
and then the owners of these websites aren't really liable
under Section two thirty, which means that as a a
website or blog. If a user is posting something that's criminal,
they're not going to be held liable for it, but
(31:41):
they're enabling this whole forum for thousands of images to
be uploaded.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
I think that the reason why their question is so
hard goes back to their age old Silicon Valley mantra
of move fast and break things, where this technology was
rolled out before legislators, regulators, the public really understood its power.
So now as we're seeing states trying to catch up
to these new tools, they're creating new laws that As
(32:12):
Maggie and I reported, we looked across the United States
and saw all the different portions of legislation that have
been created to try and target deep fakes. But we've
got a patchwork across the country now. Some states have
civil statutes, some have criminal statutes, Some only target election
related deep fake content, which is a subject we haven't
(32:32):
even had time to address on today's podcast. But other
statutes are just amendments to existing revenge porn laws. So
no one's really figured out the right way to solve
this problem yet. In October, we saw President Biden announce
a new executive order to target artificial intelligence and ensure
that it was illegal that you couldn't use these tools
(32:54):
to create child sexual abuse imagery, child porn, or intimate
imagery of individuals doing things that they never really did.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
And we don't.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Actually know when these are going to be implemented or
how they are going to be implemented. You know, that's
the big question right now.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Olivia Marghi, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Us, Thanks for having us, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more
shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Bloomberg CarPlay,
or wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you.
Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at
Bloomberg dot net. Our supervising producer is Vicky Vergalina. Our
(33:41):
senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falerro
and Moe Barrow. Raphael I'm see Lee is our engineer.
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. I'm Nancy Cook.
We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take
Speaker 3 (34:00):
The Dot Bun, the Don Staple Bar
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.