Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Gene Valaitis and Jon Liedtke discuss AI’s threats, from fake journalist identities scraping local Canadian news to Anthropic’s predictive surveillance tools. Liedtke argues that tech companies use apocalyptic warnings as PR spin for regulatory capture, seeking to create high barriers to entry to secure monopolies rather than protect public safety.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Right now though, it’s time for “Liedtke’s Got a Take” with Jon Liedtke. And good morning.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Well, I have that… really incredible story in… Valadas on the news, the guy who quit Anthropic, uh, the AI company back on Tuesday saying that, um, artificial intelligence will be capable of killing people by the end of the decade without any human involvement. In other words, it’ll just take over and do it, uh, all by itself. So, you were talking to me yesterday and, uh, you wanted to talk about, uh, artificial intelligence, the news, and social media, and, uh, how it’s kind of taken over already. So, uh, when you read that a purported news outlet literally created a fake Inuit journalist whose name I can’t pronounce—it looks like Lee Kwamadig—to pull stories out of Northern Canada, what went through your mind? I mean, it’s… it’s fake!
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, Gene. I mean, like, it… this is what’s so crazy about it, right? I mean, for years we know that bad actors have used bot farms to be dumping trash into our social media feeds, but now, literally inventing synthetic reporters with fake faces to scrape and steal real local news? Mean, but we shouldn’t be shocked about it. The entire business model of generative AI is built on industrial-scale IP theft. We know this through court cases that are ongoing. They scrape human intelligence, creativity, and sweat. They strip the credit, they repackage it, and they sell it back to us, or they turn us into the product by providing it for free and scraping our personal data to build more of their, uh, algorithms. To pull that stunt, though, in Northern Canada—a region already targeted by foreign disinformation—is a direct hit on community trust. And the operators running these scams don’t care about journalism, they don’t care about democracy, they don’t care about community. They care about free content being used for clicks to get ad revenue, consequences to democracies and societies be damned.
Gene Valaitis: And you know, uh… it’s social media is robbing Canadian broadcasters blind. ‘Cause a lot of the money is going into social media, ’cause they get clicks, and, um… you know, our… our local Hamilton TV station canceled their 6:00 and 11:00 p.m. news, not because they wanted to, but because the ad revenues are going, uh, into these social media companies in the US. They’re literally the U.S… the U.S. social media people, they’re0 literally robbing us without a gun. So, when… when… when I’m thinking about what you just said, isn’t this just the next logical step in social media disinformation? Or is there something fundamentally even worse about using… using, uh, synthetic identities to scrape news?
Jon Liedtke: I think this is worse, Gene, because this is weaponizing the identity, uh, to manufacture unearned trust. I mean, this… it’s… this is… over the past decade, we’ve mostly learned how to spot bots sharing fake links or organized disinformation campaigns, but when you wrap an AI scraper in a fake face and claim that she’s an Inuit reporter raised in Nunavut who understands the region, I mean, that’s cultural theft as well here, not just IP theft. It’s piggybacking on the credibility of real local journalists who put in the work to cover the news of their communities. So, it completely poisons the well, and if people in any community, let alone remote communities, can’t trust whether the person bylining a local story actually exists, local news collapses.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. And local news is important. That’s why we are live and local in, uh… in the region here on CKTB News. Um, you know, we… we’ve seen tech companies steal content, but what about stealing our privacy? What do you make of Anthropic’s building a… what they call a “pre-crime tracking system” for activists?
Jon Liedtke: I mean, listen, Tom Cruise gave us Minority Report as a dystopian warning, Gene. Silicon Valley treated it like a pitch deck that they found on a, I don’t know, coffee table somewhere in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley. It’s no surprise that as AI embeds itself more into our society, the national security state wants to weaponize it. But once these tech giants steal all of our data and IP to build their model, the next step, as now we’ve seen them discussing, is building predictive algorithms to monitor those who push back on the state or power more broadly. So yeah, this is a corporate power grab, it’s a state power grab that’ll inevitably be used, and we’re watching tech giants attempt to, or begin to, turn public dissent into quantifiable security threats before any crime has even been committed and sending that information to the police. This is not the same as a neighborhood watch.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, Anthropic frames itself as a safe, responsible artificial intelligence giant. So how does a company justify building, like you said, a Minority Report-style surveillance system?
Jon Liedtke: Oh, listen. They can justify it however they want to make themselves sleep at night. I think they’re sleeping at night on incredibly nice mattresses made out of hundred-dollar bills. They’re spending millions on PR to tell us they’re responsible, ethical guys that are in the room—they’re the good cops of AI. But then they’re turning around and hiring intelligence analysts to build threat-monitoring engines to target political dissent. And this… this is classic cover. They say “AI safety” when they talk to lawmakers to look good, but in practice, safety just means keeping their corporate power safe from public scrutiny. It’s terrifying in that sense, and it proves that no matter how clean the branding is, these companies will always choose surveillance over civil liberties. I mean, look, I mean, one of… OpenAI started out as a not-for-profit, and they very quickly went, “You know what? Maybe profit is the way that we need to choose.”
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Yeah, that’s so true. Uh, well, if we look at the big… big picture, on… on one hand, we’re told that artificial intelligence will do great things like stop biological aging, and on the other side, experts are warning, just like this guy, of a 10% chance without any human interaction whatsoever, it’ll start killing people. So, what side of the hype are you buying?
Jon Liedtke: Someone made a joke to me on social media yesterday: “It’s going to do both! It’ll stop the biological aging, and then it’s going to kill us all!” So, we get the best of both worlds. But no, I don’t buy either narrative at face value right now, because both are being weaponized by people looking for their bottom lines. Biotech firms claiming they can reverse or stop biological aging are just looking to pump up their valuations and drive stock prices. On the flip side, the AI apocalypse narrative is a giant PR distraction right now, which we can talk about because they don’t want competition. So, is the technology making huge strides? Absolutely. It’s solving impossible math problems—I saw one last week that hadn’t been solved in like 90 years.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon Liedtke: It’s accelerating drug discovery. But we can’t go letting shiny promises or sci-fi horror stories blind us, and we don’t need to wait 10 years for a rogue AI to destroy humanity. If we let AI destroy media integrity today and we hand over control of our democracies to corporate surveillance tomorrow, what’s worth less to save anyway? So, is the risk real? Yeah. Are the benefits equally real? Yeah, but I’m not going to fearmonger or hide under my desk. We stopped doing that with nukes, and there’s still tens of thousands of them pointed at virtually every major population center, but we don’t let it ruin our day.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Uh, in the end here, is there something more at play that we’re missing, maybe?
Jon Liedtke: I think so, Gene. I think what we’re missing here is that… what we’re really missing is that we’re watching textbook regulatory capture. Why are AI CEOs suddenly parading around Washington and Ottawa and other global capitals crying that their own technology—some in cases like weeks before their IPOs, hilarious—is a nuclear-level threat to humanity? Well, because if they can convince governments that AI is too dangerous to be left open, the legislators will pass massive licensing hurdles that pull up the ladder beneath them, keeping their competitors at bay. And if… it could outlaw open-source competition, kill off smaller startups, and guarantee that a handful of megacorporations hold a permanent monopoly over the most powerful technology on Earth. So, they’re not trying to save humanity from AI today; they’re trying to save their market share from competition tomorrow.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Jon, I miss the good old days of Facebook when I would open my page and I could enjoy squirrels waterskiing in small boats.
Jon Liedtke: Those… those were the days, Gene. Maybe we’ll get back there, but it doesn’t seem like it.
Gene Valaitis: Oh, jeez. What a great take. Thanks, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, “Liedtke’s Got a Take.” He’s back with us on a Friday morning at 9:15.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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