HRH MEDIA

I’m looking for collaborators for my latest documentary film project, “The Only Human in the Room.”

On the surface, it’s an investigation into deepfakes, synthetic identity, and what happens when we can’t tell if we’re interacting with another human on that phone or Zoom call.

But it’s really about a larger existential issue that has concerned me for years: what can we do when the foundation to our free society — trust — begins to fail, exacerbated by online technologies?

With this documentary, I’m asking “when our eyes and ears stop being reliable signals in a real-time conversation, what happens next?” It’s clear that we can no longer rely on human intuition as the final checkpoint.

In support of the film, I’m launching a new Substack called “The Human Perimeter.” It’s a real-time investigative dispatch as I continue to produce the documentary.

This is something I pioneered twenty years ago with my first film, “Independent America” where I maintained a blog while figuring out where to go next with the story. The contributions from the community made a measurable difference, taking us to unexpected places and ultimately leading to an immensely successful broadcast and streaming release. I hope to replicate that strategy here.

My first post is about the “attribution gap,” which is the “ghost” inside the FBI’s recent $20 billion #cybercrime report. Specifically, there’s $893 million in fraud attributed to AI, but it only counts the crimes that the victimes recognized as AI.

In other words, if you don’t know the person in that online HR interview was synthetically masked, or the panicked voice on the phone was a clone of your loved one (my family now has a code word to prevent this), you can’t report it as an AI crime. The most successful deepfake is the one the victim never knew was a deepfake at all.