00:09:01 · Katie Prescott
[00:09:01] S2: Yeah, using an AI tool sounds a lot more effective than the Facebook group, Are We Dating the Same Guy? Which, where people upload pictures pictures of people that they're dating. I guess the challenges with dating apps as well is people on there are in some ways vulnerable. And that's what, you know, it's a horrible way to put it, but people are being preyed on because they are opening their hearts to finding someone. And, you know, it's kind of awful, but it does also mean that it's ripe for kind of bad actors to try and abuse that.
00:09:33 · Yoel Roth
[00:09:33] S3: Yeah. I mean, dating is one of the most intimate and personal things that you can do. You are literally putting yourself out there to people that you don't know and are seeking that most fundamental of things, which is human connection. And especially in a world where we're more and more connected to other people, but find it harder and harder to actually translate that into friendship or relationships or in person connection, I think you're right that there's a real vulnerability there. And without a doubt, scammers are exploiting that vulnerability. We see that AI powered scams have been accelerated by things like large language models and chatbots, which make it easier than ever for scammers to write persuasive sounding messages that can build that trust and confidence. It's no longer as easy to spot a scam because, you know, the language doesn't quite make sense or it seems like it was written by somebody who's not a native speaker. All of these things are streamlined through the use of AI. And so we place such a high value on investment and safety precisely because people come to our apps at that moment of greatest vulnerability, and we believe we really have a responsibility as a company to protect them using all of the resources and technology at our disposal.
00:10:53 · Katie Prescott
[00:10:53] S2: I'd love to ask you about AI more broadly in the online misinformation and disinformation speech. As I said at the start, mean, you're such a deep thinker on this subject and someone governments turn to for your advice. How do you think we are tackling it? And are we doing a good enough job broadly around the world to think about the rise of misinformation and disinformation?
00:11:17 · Yoel Roth
[00:11:17] S3: You know, my personal reflection on the state of AI discourse and especially regulatory discourse is that we sometimes are a bit distracted by the existential risk conversations and can be underfocused on some of the day to day challenges that emerge around this technology. It's certainly worth giving a bit of thought to the possibility of killer robots that will end humanity. I don't want that either, to be clear, but there are very practical challenges that we're already seeing when it comes to things like election security or even AI powered scams. We see in the research that AI language is more persuasive than ordinary human conversation, and that supercharges disinformation campaigns. We see that AI powered imagery makes it easier for scammers to create convincing social media profiles. We see that agentic AI makes it faster for bad actors to automate multiple accounts. Those are the types of issues that I believe the tech sector and regulators need to be focused on. And certainly existential risk needs to be part of the conversation, but it's not the one that I would prioritize as highly as the day to day challenges we're already seeing. So when I look at a problem like the future of AI, there's both the technical side of it. How do we identify bad actors? How do we prevent misuse? How do we build things responsibly? But then also the normative side, is like, as humans, have we figured out what it is that we collectively want from these technologies? About two thirds of singles in a recent study we conducted in The UK say that they've used AI in their dating lives, but used can mean a lot of very, very different things from brainstorming creative ideas for a first date to writing messages to deepfaking your profile photos. And perception of the acceptability of AI usage varies dramatically across these uses. We need to be specific when we're talking about AI so that we can think about the right interventions.
00:13:26 · Katie Prescott
[00:13:26] S2: Do you see parallels at all with the AI safety debate and the safety debate in social media? I mean, it seems to me, Facebook was started just after I left university more than twenty years ago, and we're really getting to grips with some of the harms that it's caused in recent years. I mean, do you think that those sorts of harms will come out of AI? Are we doing a better job now at having that discussion? Or do you think there'll be a similar reckoning as there has been in the social media space?
00:13:56 · Yoel Roth, Katie Prescott
[00:13:56] S3: I think we're starting to see a faster engagement with some of the potential harms of new technologies. I think there was a real moment of utopian possibility in sort of 2009 to 2014 with social media. And it was only much later after things like Cambridge Analytica came to light or government interference in elections that we really started to think carefully about the ways that these technologies could be abused. With AI, I think we're seeing the cycle be substantially shortened. And so, yes, I think we're seeing some of the same recklessness around rapid technology development take place now as well. But the flip side is the feedback loop is not measured in years, it's measured in months and weeks. When we see chatbots that are potentially dangerous to children or encouraging them to harm themselves, it's an enormous tragedy. But we're also seeing that accountability comes swiftly. There are already lawsuits targeting some of the AI companies. There's substantial investigations in The UK and The US, and we're seeing regulators move on these issues. That encourages me because it's happening a lot faster than what we saw the first time around with social media. [00:15:16] S2: On the lawsuit front, what did you make of the recent settlement, the Meta settlement, the $18,000,000,000 settlement?