Can you trust what you see? Partisan news and AI deepfakes. Let’s go Off Script

Welcome to Unbiased Updates Off Script. We spend all week reporting the news, now we get to talk about it. Coming up on the podcast today, newspapers that look like traditional news but have a political agenda. Who's behind them and why they're targeting voters ahead of the midterms. I'll talk to the reporter who investigated. Plus, political attack ads are getting a lot more convincing thanks to AI. Now candidates are threatening legal action over videos that put words in their mouths. Our media reporter looked into where the law draws the line. People have been warning about deep fakes on the Internet since social media was invented. Right. But A.I. has presented a unique challenge where really at least somewhat convincing deep fakes are really easy to produce. And earlier this week I asked how growers get those record-breaking pumpkins so big? Well, one of you had an answer, and it involves something you probably have in your fridge. We'll see if it checks out. Let's start with what matters, what caught our attention this week, and why we think it deserves yours. Imagine finding a newspaper in your mailbox. Local stories, real reporting, looks pretty legitimate. But what if there's a political agenda behind it? That's what's happening in parts of Ohio, where a paper called The Ohio Independent has started showing up just ahead of the midterms. Its coverage leans heavily toward Democrats, and it's part of a larger network with ties to Democratic operatives. So where's the line between journalism and political messaging? Straight Arrow reporter Patrick Cooley dug into who's behind the paper and spoke to me about what he found. Patrick, there are mainstream news outlets that consumers identify on one end of the political spectrum or the other, whether those outlets like it or not. I'm curious to know, what makes these partisan papers any different than those outlets that I'm referring to? Well, looking at the American Independent, which is the one that we featured in this article, it is pretty strongly backed by people who have strong ties to the Democratic Party. You know, the founder, David Brock, he was involved with the Clinton family. He started the liberal super PAC America 21st Century Bridge. You know, he hired what seemed like liberal commentators to run these outlets. So it would seem that the difference would be is that they have pretty strong ties one way or the other. And they kind of present themselves as, you know, independent and non-biased news outlets, even though in most cases they seem to be anything but. i'm i'm glad that you mentioned how they're presenting themselves because i think this gets to another another point in your piece ostensibly it might seem like these papers are meant to trick somebody right it's like oh this is this is a good source of independent information but maybe maybe these outlets like the American Independent aren't exactly forthcoming with um their their you know political leanings or whatever else but that's not what the experts think is going on here they don't believe that these papers are meant to trick people what did they tell you about the purpose of these outlets yeah so um it's mostly just to encourage action uh is what they told me um so the the Ohio Independent which is the American Independent's Ohio news outlet um only uh their first i couldn't find any information about when they first appeared but their published articles um they don't have any published articles prior to august um which means that they appeared in the run-up to just to fiercely contest fiercely contested elections in ohio um the governor's race and the senate race here are both very close which is not something that a lot of people expected given ohio's kind of rightward tilt in the last few years um so the thinking is people read these they get mad at one side or the other and then they decide to go um nobody knows there isn't a lot of research on how well it actually works um but that does appear to be uh that does appear to be the goal of these things yeah is is there a trend of seeing more partisan papers like the ohio independent popping up in cities across the country i mean in in your reporting what have you seen when it comes to the publication of these types of these types of papers yeah so um this isn't a new thing um i want to be very clear on that um you know what we've seen in the past is that these outlets kind of just pop up um in in um in news deserts uh places where there aren't a lot of local papers um they kind of present themselves sometimes they present themselves as local uh or statewide um you know for example the american independent has like you know the carolina independent the virginia independent the wisconsin independent um so you know what we see is they pop up in areas where there aren't a lot of other competing news outlets um and they kind sometimes they present themselves as local um you know the the ohio independent for example does that genuinely have a lot of news that just focuses on Ohio um but then they come in with all of these uh national stories you know like anti-Trump anti whoever's running for the other party um so you know what the trend seems to be is that they appear in places with a lot of without a lot of local news outlets and they kind of take advantage of that vacuum um the the trend that we've kind of seen lately um at least according to my research on this is that a lot of these outlets are hiring genuine journalists um you know so you read the American Independent they do have fact-based reporting where they conduct research um you know they do a bunch of interviews and then the article is kind of them laying out their findings um what they do is just kind of fine-tune their reporting toward one side or the other you've you've just touched on something that i think is pretty fascinating is and and this is i guess you've uncovered another little nugget uh through through the reporting that you've done is that the is where these these papers show up they show up in news deserts um in places where there's a vacuum where there aren't a lot of other competing outlets um you know taking a taking a look at the landscape of uh of journalism and storytelling like what does it say that these these papers are the ones that are kind of filling the void here especially at a time when people are looking for independent sources of information unbiased sources of information uh and especially during a midterm year yeah well you may have heard me say a minute ago we don't actually know whether or not these things drive people to the polls right We don't know if they're actually spurring action like they say they want to do, right? Right. But the experts I talked to said that there is quite a bit of research on their effect on people's political views. And they're unlikely to change people's minds based on the research that's out there. But they might make you more entrenched in your position. um so you know if i did the independent i said is geared more seems more progressive geared more toward democrats um so if i was to vote if i was inclined to vote republican it's unlikely to make me change my mind um but if i'm more progressive you know i'm going to read this and um i'm going to be more polarized um you know less likely to change my mind um so i i think it's The experts I talked to said it's somewhat insidious in that way because it makes us just more polarized and, you know, less likely to be inclined to listen to someone who disagrees with us. Before we let you go, for our audience members who might encounter these papers like the Ohio Independent and The Wild, what are some things they should keep in mind about having a healthy news diet and understanding what sort of outlet they're actually consuming? yeah so i think the best piece of advice came from um i came actually from somebody in the democratic party in ohio that i talked to for this article which is that um one you should definitely get your news from more than one source and you know like a variety of sources um because you know you get an outlet like that a lot of times it's really hard to untangle who's actually behind it and what their motives are i mean i had to go through several layers of tax filings to figure out you know who founded that outlet and um who their backers were and things like that um and you know the average person just isn't going to do that with every outlet that they uh every outlet that they come across so you know just have a varied news diet um you know approach this stuff with an air of skepticism especially if it um seems to confirm what you already believe um you know just try to make sure it's like are other people reporting this kind of thing, um, you know, uh, and try to just, uh, lean on as many news sources as you can. We cover a lot every morning, but there are always a few stories we just can't squeeze in. So here are a couple that we think are also worth your time. President Trump has big plans for Greenland. He says a quote, massive search for oil, gas and minerals is about to get underway and what he calls our new and beautiful Greenland. One small problem though. Greenland is still a self governing territory of Denmark. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed experts believe Greenland has more easily accessible oil than almost anywhere else on earth. He didn't say who those experts are or when and how this exploration would actually begin. And then he turned to national security touting plans for two new US military bases on the island. Trump claimed any future attack on the US would have to come through Greenland where he says American defenses would shoot down everything from drones to missiles to weapons that haven't even been invented yet. And in another story making headlines, a sentence 30 years in the making. Dwayne Keefy D. Davis has been sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for his role in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. Tupac was just 25 when he was shot in a drive by attack near the Las Vegas Strip in September of 1996. The case went went unsolved for decades. And here's what makes this one so remarkable. Davis spent years publicly talking about his role in the killing, including in interviews and his own memoir. Those accounts became key evidence against him. He was convicted of murder in August and remains the only person ever convicted in Tupac's killing. Now, let's go inside the story. Each week we grab one of our reporters and go a little deeper. What didn't make the story, the questions that came up and what they found while reporting it. Take a listen to this campaign ad out of Wisconsin. Do you really think it matters what you peasants think? I am the anointed one. You will comply and you will vote for me. That is an order from your D.C. masters. Yeah, she never said that. That's an AI-generated version of Democratic congressional candidate Rebecca Cook posted by her Republican opponent, Congressman Derek Van Orden. Here's another. I am running for Congress to lower costs, lower costs. I am also running to booster our framers and make sure we take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare. Cook says the videos are misleading and defamatory. Van Orden's campaign defends them. But here's the question, when does political satire become defamation? Straight Arrow media reporter Mark Heierleber looked into that and told me what he found. Mark, thanks so much for joining us on Offscript. Read your piece. You say in it that attack ads are nothing new, and we see them every election cycle. But what's different is that these AI deepfakes are convincing, likely convincing a swath of people that they are in fact authentic my question to you is how exactly did we get here i mean that's a great question because people have been warning about deep fakes on the internet was since social media was invented right uh there have been concerns about influence operations covert influence operations i mean since especially like in the 2016 election right but ai has presented a unique challenge where really at least somewhat convincing deep fakes are really easy to produce and we can all kind of like look at a piece of synthetic content and we can say oh that's clearly like ai generated right like look at how like the hair is like a perfect glow and nothing seems quite smooth. There's like a little bit of robotics to it, right? Well, we're kind of coming to a tipping point where being able to actually identify with our eyes something that's AI generated is getting more, it's just getting more difficult to distinguish AI generated content. And that's what's going on in this one particular case that I wrote about in Wisconsin, where the Democratic candidate Rebecca Cook is accusing her opponent, the Republican representative Derek Van Orden, of uploading to social media deep fakes of her that are confusing voters. The idea that, hey, you know, he's posting these videos purportedly of me, but people aren't recognizing that they're AI generated so so i'm looking at this uh a little bit through the lens of well at what point uh you know does it become defamation and the things that she is saying in there are are like outlandish right in fact to the point of them being statements that perhaps a reasonable person would never believe that she would say and so that's actually part of the equation uh of whether or not, you know, an AI generated deep fake would be defamatory because the legal standard for, especially for a politician or for a public figure, is that not just does the person who's creating that deep fake have to, you know, provide some disinformation, factually incorrect information for the explicit purpose of harming that person, like the character's reputation but that a reasonable person would believe that that information is true and so you know in one of the uh most widely shared AI deep fakes of Cook that Van Orden posted to his X account she's depicted she's saying do you really think it matters what you peasants think i am the anointed one which is crazy right which i i mean like i i call it like you know you know it's like it's like a gaffe that she never actually uttered right uh and she goes on and she says i am the anointed one you will comply and you will vote for me wait wait wait mark i i gotta i gotta jump in here because this was this was part of my observation as well you know cook is claiming that she's being defamed through these videos uh and she's also worried that people may be falling for this stuff do we do we know that anybody's actually falling for this i mean i think that's a great question right that's that's her claim uh i you know i can't uh tell you with any reasonable certainty the degree to which people are falling for it but what i can say is that there is now a pretty decent amount of research into people's abilities to detect AI generated synthetic media and one report that i keep citing a lot i think it's um a really easy way to understand this is that it's framed as basically a coin flip so they found that researchers found that people are able to identify AI generated content 51 percent of the time and so there certainly is reason to believe that at least some people are falling for it i want to talk about the the impact here there's there's a report that you cite in your in your piece that says 80 million dollars have been spent on ads that use AI this cycle what's the impact of that amount of money being spent on AI ads yeah i mean i think that um a lot of people are encountering AI generated um political record or rhetoric every single day what we're seeing this election cycle is a significant amount of like disinformation or you know uh false uh false claims about political candidates um and i mean i i suppose that the concern right is that we're you know it has basically democratized the ability to quickly spread believable and convincing disinformation all right before we let you go i am curious to know about how states are responding to this uptick uh in AI political ads and if there's any movement on the federal level um if you could you know give us an outlook on you know what things could look like in the next you know going going into the the rest of the cycle and then what happens what happens next so there are now 31 states but no federal laws that regulate the use of deep fakes essentially in political campaigns a few states expressly prohibit the use of deep fakes in campaigns But primarily, the, you know, the requirements are about disclosures. And, you know, you know, like on Van Orden's posts, X has voluntarily chosen to apply a disclosure on those posts saying, hey, this was AI generated. When it comes to like political ads, many states now require those kinds of disclosures. However, those laws are also becoming the subjects of lawsuits on First Amendment grounds. Well, you know, to what degree should a speaker be required to disclose by the government required that something is, you know, utilizes AI in its production? and oh what's the threshold you know is it just edited with AI or is it completely AI generated one of the uh cases that i found pretty interesting was out of Hawaii where a court found that law did violate the First Amendment it was a case involving the the Babylon Bee which is like a conservative um satirical site something kind of like the Onion right and their argument was oh hey well like if we're required to you know include uh this disclosure on on our content then that actually kind of undercuts the joke and they won that case that's uh you know that was uh so they're they're certainly you know moving forward you know if you speak to cook she says she wants to get elected and she wants to regulate AI and one of the ways that she would want to regulate AI is to, you know, create laws that, you know, a federal, you know, rule around AI deepfakes and campaigns. But that certainly would, you know, face First Amendment scrutiny. And, you know, all of these other state laws will continue to do so as well. Again, Mark's story is titled Politicians are making AI deepfakes of their rivals The targets say it's defamation. Check it out on our site or on the Straight Arrow app. And finally today, here's the kicker. A little follow-up to a story we told you about Tuesday on Unbiased Updates. You may remember Rocky, a 2,389 pound pumpkin that won the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay this week. After the story, I asked how on earth they grow those things so big and well one of you had an answer. Brandon on YouTube says growers remove the other pumpkin so the plant puts all its energy into one. And then, he said, they feed it milk. Huh. Well, Brandon, turns out you're right about the first part. Growers really do remove the other pumpkins to help one grow bigger. But the milk? That's an old gardening myth. There's no good evidence it helps. Turns out the real secret is good genetics, lots of water, sunlight, and fertilizer. So thanks for the answer. We really do appreciate it. I guess that means you can save the milk for your cereal, folks. You don't have to use it on pumpkins. By the way, for those listening, if you want to see Rocky, we'll post pictures on sand.com or our app. Okay, that's it for us this week. Thanks for listening to Unbiased Updates Off Script. For all of us here at Straight Arrow, I'm Christian Bryant. We'll see you again next week. Have a good one.