#1014 Walter Scheirer: A History of Fake Things on the Internet

Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, Ricard Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Walter Schirer. Is Dennis Udoric legit professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and today we're talking about his book A History of Fake Things on the Internet. So, Dr. Scharrer, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you one. Great. Thank you so much for inviting me. So Tell us first, uh particularly as a professor of computer science and engineering.

What motivated you to write such a book? And what is basically its main premise? Yeah, so this is a great question because it's kind of an unusual thing for a computer science professor who's typically writing code and writing, you know, uh scientific papers to jump in and write a book. Um that's kinda targeted at a public facing audience and a book that's really like a history of technology. Um, for many years in my sort of more traditional research, I had been looking at uh an area called media forensics within uh computer science and electrical engineering. Um this this is kind of a research area that is trying to understand how one can

detect manipulated digital images and videos, how one can detect synthesized uh content, right? That's coming from generative AI now. Um and and other types of synthetic content. Um and Wha what's interesting about this is like it has a big social component, right? Because like who's creating that that content, right? Should we be worried about it? There's a political uh component to it.

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