By 2026, experts estimate, about 90% of media on social networks will be created using AI. But already today, an unprecedented use of artificial intelligence is being made to create fake media for the needs of election campaigns or international conflicts. To deal with these threats, Michael Matias together with his colleagues from Hida 8200 and Stanford University founded the start-up company Clarity with the aim of trying to stop the fake media just before it appears on our screens.
“In a world where 90% percent of the content on the networks will be created by AI, each of us will involuntarily take part in a cyber attack the moment we watch, comment or share a video that is not real.”
Already today there are quite a few companies that specialize in the production and distribution of deep pike, and it seems that this field is still in its infancy. “The world of AI attracts millions of dollars and every day more companies are established that increase the competition as well as the level of quality and accessibility. Everyone has already heard about the fact that there are companies working so that in a few years we will all have an avatar that can replace us in Zoom calls, and that our bank representative will be replaced by a virtual figure that looks and sounds exactly like him. This will have many positive consequences – but no one talks about the possible cyber dangers and the fact that in a virtual world, we will also be exposed every day to dozens and hundreds of virtual frauds.
An attack, for example, of thousands of videos at once without a proper defense system, can decide elections, collapse companies and lead people and countries to make fateful decisions
Michael Matias says:
“During my service at 8200, I recognized how the combination of cyber and artificial intelligence was going to very soon impact financial, security and policy systems in an unprecedented way.
The more you research the subject – you realize that cyber is already today one of the biggest threats facing democracy and the development of artificial intelligence is the engine that will make it possible to carry out broad cyber attacks anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, we have reached a situation where, although these attacks are already an integral part of everyday life – there was still no effective security mechanism that would try to deal with them. That’s why we founded Clarity.”
Michael is the son of Yossi Matias, who currently serves as vice president of Google worldwide and CEO of Google’s research and development center in Israel. “I grew up in a home where AI is part of everyday discourse. While my father led artificial intelligence projects at Google, my mother served as deputy legal counsel and brought home the political plane. The connection between the two worlds led me to research the effects of AI on democratic countries and finally to establish the company together with professors from Stanford who specialize in democratic regimes.”
Since the company was founded in 2022, Clarity has been used by financial, military and government institutions, as well as media organizations and senior public figures, to detect AI manipulations in video, images, audio and verify their trustworthiness. In doing so, the company helps to prevent the spread of incorrect information that aims to engineer public consciousness, and worse – to prevent fraud, phishing attacks and infiltration of information into sensitive mechanisms from the individual level to the state.
One of the main challenges the company faces is the threat of the “deep-fake” – video and audio content that looks and sounds completely reliable, even though it never actually happened. “Deep-fake content is actually one of the types of attacks that have intensified due to the combination of cyber and artificial intelligence. If in the past it was very difficult to edit content using Photoshop or other software, today anyone with a computer can use AI platforms to generate an unlimited number of free and fast – No more fake content”.
Today it only takes 30 seconds of voice recording to produce a perfect deepfake for any human being. Already today we witness many cases in which people receive phone calls allegedly from a colleague or their boss, who asks them to take actions with far-reaching consequences. In the United States, an epidemic has even spread in which parents receive phone calls from their children screaming that they have been kidnapped, and then the creator of the deepfake demands a ransom from the frightened parents.”
“Such events mainly concern the individual, but they can also endanger organizations and even pose a threat to the security of the country. This already happened in the Russia-Ukraine war when a video of Zelensky instructing the army commanders to lay down their weapons was circulated online, or when the president’s personal adviser went to talk to the US ambassador.” in Russia, and only after ten minutes of the parties exchanging sensitive information, it became clear that it was a deep-fake and the ambassador was not on the line at all. As it happened there, it can happen anywhere else.”
We are in the middle of an international arms race – and those who do not protect themselves against the threats of the deep-fake, may find themselves sooner or later on the attacked side. Therefore, just as Check Point broke through when they created the firewall for the communication networks, now the world needs companies that will provide it with a firewall for the deep-fake threats.”
This is exactly the protection network that Clarity provides to its customers – implementing advanced protection systems and providing them with a technological advantage that allows them to always be “one step ahead” of the dangers. Among the company’s 15 employees today, we can name quite a few Check Point veterans as well as Israeli intelligence personnel.
