Former head of Google's webspam team Matt Cutts discusses the technical challenges of detecting AI-generated synthetic media and deepfakes.
Opinion
Building dog-walking or weed delivery apps is not saving the world
“Why am I going to go work on Uber for dog walkers? Or how to deliver weed to people better? Which is a, it's a fine problem to work on, but you're not saving the world if you're doing that.”
Assertion Partly supported
Cutts: HUD has over 8,000 employees and zero IT staff under 30
“HUD, Housing and Urban Development, has 8000 plus employees. According to the statistics, the number of IT experts, like, there's a job classification, 2210, blah blah blah, we'll just say IT people. The number of IT people under 30 at HUD is zero.”
What-if
Cutts: AltaVista would have crushed Google if they grasped ranking signals
“I remember when Alta Vista, I was worried they were going to crush us. Cause like, you know, you have a certain number of ranking signals and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even like copied our appearance.”
Assertion Supported
Cutts: The SearchKing lawsuit established search results are First Amendment protected
“The result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the first amendment.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early Google spam moderation lacked the trauma modern content moderators face
“Like Safe Search was just towards pornography, and spam was more like, buy cheap Viagra, and loan consolidation stuff, and so it wasn't nearly as bad as a lot of the content moderators had to deal with.”
Insight
Cutts: Fighting spam permanently conditions you to see exploit vectors everywhere
“There is one aspect, though, in which once you've seen all the different ways in which people try to spam and cheat and break the rules, you can't unsee that. Like, it's the black hat mindset. Like, once you realize, hey, here's a thing where people can recycl…”