In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert sit down for a one-on-one conversation to catch up on their recent vacations and discuss some of the latest developments in the legal industry. Marlene shares her experience in Hawaii, where she enjoyed beautiful beaches, a nature preserve, and delicious local cuisine with her family. Greg, on the other hand, talks about his trip to South Africa, where he spent time in Kruger National Park observing wildlife and learning about the challenges of rhino poaching.

The conversation then shifts to the recent lawsuits filed by The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mother Jones against OpenAI and Microsoft for using their copyrighted material to train AI systems. The hosts discuss the implications of these lawsuits and draw parallels to the music industry’s past struggles with Napster and the eventual rise of streaming services.

Marlene introduces a new AI-powered comic maker she discovered, which allows users to generate comic strips based on their own images and descriptions. Despite some humorous mishaps with her own generated character, she sees potential in the tool for creating engaging content. Greg shares his experience with Hedra, an AI tool that animates still pictures to create talking head videos, and the two discuss the possibility of creating a fully AI-generated podcast episode.

The hosts also explore practical applications of AI, such as AI Excel Bot, which generates Excel formulas based on plain text instructions and explains existing formulas in simple terms. They discuss how this tool could be beneficial for professionals who frequently work with complex spreadsheets.

Lastly, Greg highlights an episode of the Technically Legal podcast featuring Brandon Epstein, Chief Forensic Officer at Medex, who discusses the challenges of detecting deep fakes and the digital fingerprints left by various recording devices. The conversation emphasizes the importance of authenticating videos, especially in the news media, and the ongoing battle between deep fake creators and forensic experts.

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Greg, welcome to the geek in review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer

Greg Lambert 0:13
And I’m Greg Lambert. And this week, since Marlene, you’re back, I think the entire month of June, we’re off. And

Marlene Gebauer 0:22
so we’re you and me, yeah.

Greg Lambert 0:25
So we decided we were just going to do a sit down, one on one kind of catch back up on some things that have been going on and a number of things that we’ve just kind of run across recently. Yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 0:36
yeah. Just sort of have a little catch up session. So, yep, very good. So we thought we’d sit down, you know, we talk about things, you know, ranging from giving ourselves some really well needed vacation time, right to the number of AI lawsuits that are going on and other interesting stuff that we, you know, we’re seeing in regards to innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. So

Greg Lambert 1:00
this kind of feels like our old segment, and I think I’m going to put some little reverb when I say it, yes,

Marlene Gebauer 1:07
yes, yes, yes.

Greg Lambert 1:08
So we used to have a segment that we called information inspirations.

Marlene Gebauer 1:16
Oh, my God, I forgot. I forgot about the reverb. That’s great.

Greg Lambert 1:19
Yeah. So let’s, let’s start with an easy topic and brag about our vacation experiences. I’ll let you go first, since you went off to, I think, our 50th state, Hawaii,

Marlene Gebauer 1:34
that’s right, I went to Hawaii, and both of us had some some we put some distance, you know, we put some miles on the airplane. So yeah, but I went to Hawaii with my family, and we were in Oahu, so we spent about a week there. We went. We went to and it was great, because, you know, like, the boys were actually totally into it, and they were actually off their phones for a period of time. So that was nice. And, you know, we had conversations and things, so that was good. We went to Oahu, like I said, and we went to Diamond Head. We went to, I can’t remember the names of a lot of things, but it’s a blowhole in Hawaii, in Hawaii, which is nearby Greg, I think I shared the pictures with you that it says, you know, don’t go beyond this point, yes. And you know, you know, you know, we went beyond that point. So yeah, we got we got up close and personal and got some great pictures. We went to a couple of beautiful beaches, of course. We checked out Waikiki too. And then we went to a a preserve, a nature preserve. It’s basically a bay, very shallow, but lots of coral, lots of, you know, water, aquatic life. So got lots of wonderful pictures of the different fish and wildlife that live there. I got bit by a trigger fish.

Greg Lambert 2:55
You got triggered by a trigger the trigger fish

Marlene Gebauer 2:57
got triggered by me. I mean, that’s it. That’s a thing there. They’re beautiful, but they can be aggressive, and I think I might have gotten a little too close to mama and the eggs, so when I was very enthusiastically taking pictures. So anyway, I’m I survived no scars. And, yeah, I’m trying to think, what else that was cool. Like, so good food. So we really loved the shaved ice. We just couldn’t get enough of the shaved ice. Like every day, we would get the shaved ice and tropical flavors, and it was just absolutely delicious. My son has to he has some dietary restrictions, so we were on the on the lookout for things that weren’t gluten free. So he found this. He found this dish. It’s basically french fries and hot dogs. And so he was eating that pretty much every night for a while. And let’s see if I remember. It was the it was essentially what’s it called? The purple potato.

Greg Lambert 4:05
Like, purple potato, like, yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 4:10
plant, no, no, no. It’s, it’s the, like, the blue potatoes. Oh, yeah, me, well, anyway, I don’t, I can’t remember off the top of my head right now, but they do things with that, like you would do with, you know, regular potato, sweet potatoes. So they had this type of pie that was deep purple, and, and, and, so we, of course, had to have that too.

Greg Lambert 4:31
Yeah, maybe that’s where the band got its name from. That’s

Marlene Gebauer 4:34
it. That’s it. So, you know, it was, it was, it was a great it was a great time. Great vacation we had, we had a it was really great experience. So hopefully we will go back soon.

Greg Lambert 4:45
Very cool, very cool. So my tell us about your trip. Yeah, my big deal trip was to South Africa. So my wife and I went to there. We actually planned this. We had. A 13 hour layover in Paris. So we went into Paris on our way over and had a good time. Love, love Paris. So beautiful city. In fact, I’ve been motivated to do Duolingo and learn a little French, so hopefully go back. But then we took, you know, 11 hour flight from Paris to Johannesburg, and we spent five days in Kruger National Park getting just getting familiar with the all of the animals there, taking lots of pictures, but staying very far away from In fact, I think the day we left, one of the tour Jeeps got a little too close to an elephant in the elephant up ended it. So, yeah, so luckily not, not on our on our trip, but some somebody, you know, it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes, and so it’s

Marlene Gebauer 6:00
a little different than getting attacked by Trigger Fish.

Greg Lambert 6:05
It is, it is just, just a little bit. So I did read something, because we saw basically most of the animals there. So, you know, we saw, you know, zebras, giraffes, lions, hyena, hyenas, warthogs, wildebeest, water buffalo, ton, tons and tons. Zebra. Yeah, zebra and so. But the one we didn’t see is rhinos. And as you probably know, the poaching of rhinos is really, really bad right now. In fact, I just saw right before we jumped on and someone had pointed to an article that the Rangers are injecting the rhino horns with this radioactive isotope that doesn’t do anything to the the rhino, but no, it’s not for tracking. It actually then makes the horn useless for human consumption. Okay, and so which is what’s going on the they’re killing the rhinos. They’re only taking the horn, leaving, leaving the body, and then sending, sending the horn to other places to be ground up and used as traditional medicine, or whatever you would call it. So they’re hoping that one, I think, they are getting, because the three countries that that the Kruger National Wildlife touches are working together to try and stop the poaching by one both with the police action within the park to monitor and apprehend poachers into injecting money into the local communities to make it because it’s not I think they get less than, like, $1,500 for a horn, yeah?

Marlene Gebauer 8:04
Make it less lucrative. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 8:05
And so $1,500 doesn’t sound like a lot to you and me, unless it’s a car repair, then it sounds like a lot.

Marlene Gebauer 8:14
Get started on that

Greg Lambert 8:16
before some of the people there in the areas around the park. You know, $1,500 is a lot of money. So, yeah, they’re trying, trying to get rid of that. Let me think food beer wise was not great.

Marlene Gebauer 8:31
I love how you go to beer first, yeah, and then food. Well, priorities,

Greg Lambert 8:35
Marlene, priorities, beer was very, you know, traditional, kind of almost like a Budweiser, but Heineken was the was the big beer, and then they had, like, Black Label, when, when, when, hook was another one, a couple of others. I did not partake. A group of ours closed the bar one night, taking a bunch of Jager shot Jagermeister shots. Oh, yeah, I don’t do Jagermeister since the incident, and exactly, so

Marlene Gebauer 9:12
I think we all have one of those. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 9:13
I am not in college anymore, so feel no need to do that. So had a great time. If anyone’s ever thinking about doing it, we did a bus tour, not necessarily for everybody, but we liked it because, one, they drive on the left hand side of the road in South Africa. So I didn’t want to drive and learn how to learn how to navigate that. And then, you know, you could watch things as you were going from place to place, or you could take a nap. So it was really nice options, like you said, Yep. Now I had one other thing that I wanted to besides South Africa, that I wanted to talk about. Is just to show you what you know. I guess maybe this is putting the nerd in the geek in review. But I. So I went, my wife and I travel a lot on the weekend. She’s working on her Doctorate in Education. She means a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and it was killing our weekends, because her assignments are always due on Sunday. So we cut a deal where I would drive, we would go drive around the state of Texas, which is, you know, pretty big, and we would do one day, two day trips. And so we went to a state park, and we found that there’s a map of Texas that has all of the state parks, but they’re scratch off. So each one, as you go, you scratch off the little silver layer, and it’s kind of a purplish at least the one we did this weekend. So there’s 80 some odd, I think it’s 85 or 88 state parks. And so that’s my our next endeavor is we’re starting from scratch, even though we’ve been to a lot of them, start from scratch and then not knock one or two out, you know, a month and so got something to do for the next five years.

Marlene Gebauer 11:04
And I think you did. You’ve done one already, right?

Greg Lambert 11:06
Yeah, we did, what did we do? We did Stephen F Austin State Park, which is kind of between Houston and and Austin, closer to Houston, but nice, nice part gave us some camping ideas. But, yeah, that’s a great you know, state parks are such a fun place to do, and we bought the annual pass so it doesn’t cost us anything other than our time and other than the pass and gas money and the annual pass. So which, which was not, but is

Marlene Gebauer 11:39
it? But the annual pass is actually worth it. I mean, if you know, particularly, if you’re going to be doing this, it is definitely, definitely, definitely worth it. Yeah, I did know about the scratch. Oh, so go ahead.

Greg Lambert 11:48
I was gonna say, I think, think the annual pass was, I think it’s $80 Yeah, so basically $1 a park,

Marlene Gebauer 11:58
yes, totally, totally, totally worth it. I didn’t know about the scratch off map. I will have to, I will have to check that out. I mean, I’ve been to a number of the Texas State Parks already, but, you know, I haven’t, I haven’t had the opportunity to scratch things off, so I might have to go check that out. And speaking of camping, yours, yours truly, is, is going to be be roughing it in about a week. So we’ll see if I come back. But truly roughing it, sort of hike in, hike out, type of camping. Yeah, I’ve never done that before, so, you know, I was this many years old when I started, and not in Texas, in a different place. I’ll leave that. I’ll leave that a surprise. So

Greg Lambert 12:43
nice. Well, hopefully it’s cooler. Hopefully it’s cooler. Where you’re going, it will be, I’m looking at my watch, it’s 97 degrees up, and my

Marlene Gebauer 12:52
only, my only worry, is that hurricane barrel will screw everything. I’m hoping not, yeah,

Greg Lambert 13:01
is very possible, so we’ll see how that goes. So, all right, you ready to dive into some geeky news about

Marlene Gebauer 13:11
I think so. All right, well, I want

Greg Lambert 13:13
to start off, and I know this topic has been talked a lot in the news, and that is the New York Times versus open AI lawsuit. There is another lawsuit that just came out, I think, the four or five days ago, where open AI and Microsoft has been sued by another news organization for using articles to train the AI systems, and this time it was the Center for Investigative Reporting. I also think the company behind Mother Jones is also suing open AI and Microsoft. So it’s really interesting, and not so much. I think we, most of us, understand the reasoning that The New York Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mother Jones is suing them, is that fact that there’s this copyrighted material that they have, and everyone knows, even though I don’t think the AI companies are boldly coming out and saying it. But everyone knows that this, that content has been ingested, and part of the large language model. You know, you hear arguments that the information by itself is does, may not make a difference to the LLM, but in the aggregate. You know, once you start adding these on, it really does make a difference in how the LLM is trained and how useful the results are in so these companies open AI, I think, has cut deals with other publishers and so.

Which basically, you know, not, not quite the same. They didn’t go out and just grab all of the music, but they had a platform that shared all of the music. And, you know, at the time, people and myself included, were really excited, you know, to be able to get music. You know, music was expensive. A CD was like, yeah, what? 18 bucks, yeah, all right, and, and most of the time you only want one song off of off of its own Napster with

Marlene Gebauer 20:28
the album format, yes, yeah.

Greg Lambert 20:32
But really, you know, because of this in Napster, of course, being shut down. But the whole process of streaming music suddenly became, in part as a result of that. And if you’ll remember, the the companies thought that streaming was going to kill the the record industry, and it actually probably ended up saving the record industry in some aspects, more than CDs. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer 21:01
I mean, I think a lot of artists are, like, not happy with some of these platforms because they don’t get paid enough, right and right and I mean, unless you’re, you know, someone who, who can leverage your your fame, then I think you do. You do very well. But, yeah, but, but, I mean, you know also, technology is, is made it easier for people to just create their music and put them up on streaming services like you don’t. You don’t need all of the, you know, the the expense, the backing, in order to, you know, make music and get it out to people. So, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s a benefit there,

Greg Lambert 21:37
there’s a number of benefits, big, the big record companies still dominate, even streaming, but, yeah, there’s, I guess it’s more, I think, more democratic, I guess is the way that you can look at it. But at the same time, you know, you, you’ve obviously, to me, if we’re looking at projecting, what’s going to happen to udio and and suno is, I would say this, if you like using it, dive in and use it now, because it’s probably not going to be around much longer, you know, maybe another year or two as this winds its way through court. But I would, I would be very surprised if this, if this wasn’t shut down, that being said, it’s not that much different than what the yellow limbs are doing, right?

Marlene Gebauer 22:28
Yeah, well, I mean, I was, when I was, I was thinking about it. And, you know, we’ve had, we’ve had an episode about, I mean, it was about art and sort of, how, how, you know, using generative AI to create visual art was, you know, his has been also one of these, these very hot button, you know, areas in terms of of artists and how, you know, how they feel that their their rights aren’t being protective, but also allow into democratizing, you know, allowing people who may not have art, this is terrible. May not have artistic ability, you know, but the vision able, able, I’m

Greg Lambert 23:09
raising my hand for the people that are on audio only, I know

Marlene Gebauer 23:15
we’ll be able to to put together things and just sort of have a whole other, you know, avenue of this. And then this is, this is very similar, you know, I’m trying to think, you know, if you know the audios, win this, you know, it could open up a whole new world of creativity. But at the same time, how do we protect, you know, how do we protect, you know, the actual artists, you know, in terms of creating things, and so it’s not just sort of taken from them and used for other purposes.

Greg Lambert 23:44
Yeah. And one of the things that’s being pointed out, and you’re seeing it with Tiktok, you’re seeing it with YouTube, is that they are licensing, again, with the big with the studios to use the music. It’s not like I think YouTube May, I think they may be trying to figure out a way to do this music generation tool, but right now they’re licensing it more for the YouTube shorts and, of course, the Tick Tock videos to where you’re using 1530, seconds of a of a song, and not the, not the entire thing the music industry. Again, one of the things that that has been very interesting, especially with Tiktok, even with all of its issues, is that there are songs that are charting again, that haven’t charted in 20 years. So it’s really interesting to see kind of this people rediscovering music through this short video platform. So again, it’s really interesting to see kind of the offshoots and the. The, I think unintended benefits that happen from this in a way that people think differently about the way art is kind of conceived and shared. Really interesting. I

Marlene Gebauer 25:16
can just say, I mean, just from experience like, you know, my kids find music that they probably wouldn’t have found otherwise through, through Tiktok, you know, older things or something where they were like, Oh, I didn’t know about this. And then we get to talk about it. And, I mean, maybe you know what you’re you’re raising in terms of music generation. I mean, maybe, maybe that’s the way these guys come out, is, that okay? It’s a music generation tool. You know, you have to pay a subscription fee for it in order to use certain things. And that way, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s accessible, but people get paid.

Greg Lambert 25:54
No yet, no, no, no, no. I agree. I it’s just so interesting. Because imagine, you know, if you if you mean, you can

Marlene Gebauer 26:03
make your music on your own. You know, like there are plenty of ways to do it for free. And, I mean, there’s plenty of people that you know are on Tiktok or Insta or whatever, that tell you how to do it. But if you don’t want to do that, you know you want to make your own with some help, you know, from from Taylor Swift, or whoever, then you have that option, yep,

Greg Lambert 26:26
all right, well, I wanted to, I think we’ll leave the being, yeah, what’s sued? What’s next? Let’s talk about some interesting tech that we’ve run into, or some stories that you ran across. I am going to be quiet for a minute, because I think I’ve have been a little too much out in front with these stories. So I saw you ran across a an image maker that has a little different space. Yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 26:56
hang on one second. I’m just like pulling up some stuff here for a second for it. Okay? So I, you know, I have been talking to you, you know, this, I’ve been talking to you for a little bit now about how I want to do a comic for the geek in review. You know, just have a strip, you know, like, maybe once a week, or something like that. That’s probably too much, once a month. Maybe, yes, love to do it once a week, maybe once a month. So we’ve been, I’ve been talking to you about, like, you know, I want to do something like that. So I found this comics. It’s comics maker AI, and it looked like it was pretty good. And so I started playing around with it. And, you know, they have different they have different types of genres of comic. They have superhero comic, they have traditional comic, they have golden age comic. It’s like they have all different ones that you can choose. So you can choose like the format, and then you offer, you can upload a picture, you can offer description of of yourself, and it will generate images. And then from there, you can, you know, they have formatting for a strip where you can basically insert people and, you know, thought bubbles, or speech bubbles and things like that. All right, right.

Greg Lambert 28:08
So how did it turn out?

Marlene Gebauer 28:11
Well, I looked at, I believe it was the traditional, traditional comic, and I’m actually pulling up the picture now, I sent it to

Greg Lambert 28:18
you for the YouTube people. I’ll put a picture on it, but,

Marlene Gebauer 28:22
oh my God, just, please don’t put, please don’t start with that one. Please don’t put the bad one. Well, don’t I’ll decide which one you put up of me. So anymore, then it’s like I started with Greg. And you know, Greg can show that one. Greg looks perfectly normal, okay? He, he, you know, he has a a polo shirt on. He has a jacket. He has, like, rolled up sleeves, got a pair of slacks or jeans or something on, yeah,

Greg Lambert 28:49
you know how I dressed in in 1985

Marlene Gebauer 28:54
but when I do it, and I tell you, I mean, I had to really mess around with this a lot, and just just getting more frustrated as more and more I went on, like the first one I’m wearing, like a a dress from maybe the 1930s that, like a little girl would wear. It’s like, no. And then,

Greg Lambert 29:15
like, you look like Annabelle, the from the horror film.

Marlene Gebauer 29:21
Terrific. That’s awesome. And then the next one I have looks like I’m Hermione Granger, okay, I got a tie. I got like, a long jacket, a pleated skirt, and a vest with like, loafers and ankle socks. It’s like, really, yeah, that’s like

Greg Lambert 29:36
a double, double pleated, yes, there’s a pleat on a pleat, a

Marlene Gebauer 29:41
pleat on a pleat, mini pleat, many pleats, mini pleats, and then the last one. I don’t even know what this is like. I’m I look like a backpack. This looks like I’m going camping. Okay. I mean, I have blue hair, but I did that on purpose that was legit, um, but, well,

Greg Lambert 29:58
maybe this gives you some ideas when you. Go camping next week, I’m gonna,

Marlene Gebauer 30:01
I’m gonna wear the gloves. I’m gonna wear the rubber gloves. Yeah, because they look like rubber dish gloves. And, you know, I’ve got to make sure that I wear my pants like, you know, rolled up to my my knees, and let’s see, oh, I have, I do have hiking shoes on, and I do have socks that are high enough so you don’t get ticks on you. So that’s good.

Greg Lambert 30:21
So, yeah, it might work for campions are a little exposed

Marlene Gebauer 30:24
and get you, that’s true. I need to, I need to roll them down a little bit. But yes, so I am, this is still a work in progress. I’m not. I am not happy with with what I have been given, but I will, I will continue to try.

Greg Lambert 30:37
Yeah, well, I can tell you one thing. You know, you need to untuck your shirt, and because you’re not wearing a belt, you know, come on, come on. Marlene, jeez.

Marlene Gebauer 30:47
I’m sorry they didn’t train the AI correctly. So

Greg Lambert 30:52
next thing you know, you’ll be wearing a white hat after Labor Day.

Marlene Gebauer 30:57
Yes, right? White shoes after, after Labor games. That’s right, that’s right. But you saw you saw one. Was it. It was called Hedra.

Greg Lambert 31:06
Hedra. So yes, this one, I’ve only played around with it a little bit, and I posted a sample of it on on my LinkedIn page. And I was actually in South Africa when I was doing this. So my my wife and I were at breakfast. We we spent a couple of days in Johannesburg, and we were taking it easy. So I was at breakfast, I ran across this, this thing from a story I was reading. And then, so I took a still picture of myself, and I’m while I was eating breakfast. And you can, you can do a couple of things with it. One, well, actually, you can do a number of things. One, you can, just like with the with your comic strip AI tool, you can describe a picture, and it will generate an image of someone. I did that I was trying to do, like a news reporter, look for and because I was going to test it on the AI lawyer talking tech podcast that I do, which is all automated, so I thought it’d be kind of cool to like do a lead in that’s video and and so what it does is basically animates a still picture so that it looks like it’s talking, and you can upload a script and have it and have it use a voice, or you can upload an mp three file. So what I did was took a still picture of myself, I pulled out my phone and recorded a short message and then uploaded it. I think the message was like 42 seconds. It says, if it’s more than 30 seconds, it may cut it off, but it did not cut cut this off. And it, you know, you kind of move a little bit. Your head kind of moves a

Marlene Gebauer 32:56
little bit. You like, Max Headroom, yeah.

Greg Lambert 33:00
And then, you know, and it blinks. And that’s where, when I posted it on LinkedIn, it was the blinking, I think that everyone was like, That’s doesn’t look right,

Marlene Gebauer 33:11
yeah,

Greg Lambert 33:12
I have an

Marlene Gebauer 33:13
idea. Oh, go ahead.

Greg Lambert 33:14
Oh, go ahead. No, no, I want to

Marlene Gebauer 33:16
hear your I have an idea. All right, so we do have a friend of ours who had suggested we do a totally AI generated podcast, and then we do it for real, and we compare, we compare the differences. So this is, this is sort of an add on to that we as part of the AI podcast. We have us in, using it for Hedra, using it in Hedra, and give it the script, give it the AI script. And so we have completely generated people doing a completely generated script, and then see how that compares. Oh, boy, that would be fun.

Greg Lambert 33:52
That sounds fun. I want to see what happens. I have my doubts on

Marlene Gebauer 33:57
how well that’s going to work. I don’t think we’re going to be replaced anytime soon? So, no, I

Greg Lambert 34:01
don’t think so either. I move move a lot more than what the picture does. I think she do so, but yeah, hidra, I think it’s hedra.com H, E, D, R, A, and then, right now, it’s free, so you know, if you want to get out there and test it, okay,

Marlene Gebauer 34:18
well, I got another one too. So and this is for all the people out there who really love Excel and who doesn’t like because it’s so easy to use. Well, Ryan

Greg Lambert 34:33
Mclean had an article on three geeks a couple of weeks ago. You talked about, remember the first time you sorted a column in Excel, and it worked. And you thought that that is pure magic,

Marlene Gebauer 34:45
yeah, total magic. Well, I got, I got some more magic to lay on you. So there is something that I heard about. It’s called AI Excel bot, okay, and so what you do is you write. Right? I think you might be able to speak it, but I know you had can write it. You basically write text instructions and it will give you the formula that you need. I know, right? Yeah,

Greg Lambert 35:12
that’s where I still Google Excel expressions.

Marlene Gebauer 35:18
Like, how do you do this? So this, this basically, and it’s free, at least it’s to a certain level, it’s free. And you can, you know, like, it’ll be some Column A when cell B 10 equals the word hello, and then it’s like, equals all caps, some if, parens, B, 10, comma, parens, hello, I’m not sorry, not friends, quotation marks, hello and quotation comma, a colon, a close, parens, thank you for you to say, it’s easy. It’s Yeah, well, easy for the easy for the AI to say, and I, you know, for, for all those people that, that you know, are a little a little nervous about using Excel this. This could be a real help aid. I

Greg Lambert 36:05
wonder. Wonder if the V lookup commands or you have to pay for that V lookup. I don’t know. I may pay for that. I could pay for that. So, yep, very cool, very close. So what? What kind of practical applications. Do you think this has for the audience,

Marlene Gebauer 36:24
anybody who uses Excel like, I mean, if you’re, if you’re, you know, doing budgets, if you’re doing, you know, large spreadsheets, complicated spreadsheets, you know, and you need to, you know, you just need to manipulate data. I mean, I think all of us, you know, all of us do that. And the other thing it will do is it’ll explain a formula too. So if you have the formula and you don’t know what it is, you can basically have it, you know, you plug that, and it’ll tell you in plain language what that is.

Greg Lambert 36:54
Very cool. Yeah, all right. So, so my last story is actually another podcast. And, you know, at some point I think Bob Ambrogi and us, and then Chad main from technically legal, we need to do, like a joint podcast, where it’s like, maybe we do it, where the whole episode goes across all three podcasts.

Marlene Gebauer 37:25
This is another project. We have the Gen AI working now we have this one and Okay,

Greg Lambert 37:28
now we’ve got the the three part series, but Chad on his technically legal podcast, had Brandon Epstein, who’s the chief forensic officer at a company called medics. And, you know, there’s so much talk right now about deep fakes going on, especially with with video, and I would say even, even with audio, because he talked briefly about, you know, there was the Joe Biden robo call that. And I think the it ended up being actually someone that was in the Democratic Party that did it just to raise awareness of it. So, you know, hey, whatever. But when it, when it comes to deep fakes, especially video deep fakes, Brandon Epstein was talking about just how, on the hardware level of creating videos, that there’s essentially these digital fingerprints. So if you know something has been recorded on an iPhone, or if it’s been recorded on a video camera or a webcam or a Google phone that that each one with its with the hardware itself, encodes its own signature to that and he the Brandon was was talking about how, at least forensics right now that the deep fakes are not sophisticated, the AI itself is not sophisticated enough to kind of mask the underlying authenticity of a video, and so they had this great conversation. Highly suggest listening to it if you want to hear more about how the forensics industry is fighting deep fakes. And it’s probably going to get even worse as times goes on for this, but definitely good on validating video, they talked about some of the things that they did with the Ukrainian government to validate that things that were coming in were authentic that they weren’t. Yeah, and especially for in. Yeah, and I didn’t know this, the forensics industry actually works with a lot of media companies, especially news companies, to verify that the videos that they’re getting in are actually authentic. So I learned that I didn’t even think about whether or not a, you know, the New York Times had to authenticate a video, you know, from Palestine or

Marlene Gebauer 40:26
from they probably have to do it all the time now, yeah,

Greg Lambert 40:28
I imagine it’s probably just part of the due diligence process for this, but really interesting conversation. And you know, this is against something that we’re going to hear more and more and more about. Yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 40:44
I listened to it this morning when I was walking the dog. And first of all, I think he worked in New Brunswick for a long time. So yay. Shout out to New Jersey. Shout out to New Brunswick, home of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. It’s like, here Fun Fun fact, and then I’ll go back to what we’re actually talking about. So did you know that Rutgers could have been part of the Ivy League, but they turned it down. Hashtag regrets. Man, that was a big mistake. But anyway, like, I liked his analogy. He used the analogy of, like bricks. So there’s a brick and it’s composed of different parts. And you can, they can be mixed and matched different ways, but they have to all have these, you know, five components, but they can be swizzled around different ways. And then when you know, you’re saying, okay, you know, I’m gonna give that to like a third like, you can basically identify who it is based on how the configuration is. So again, you sort of the Android, the the Apple phone, you can tell, and then he’s talking about, when you upload to those, those third party providers, that while the metadata, a lot of that gets kind of changed and modified, like those basic blocks do not, which is how you can determine where, where it came from. And, you know, I, you know it’s like a footprint, and you know you were talking just just before, about how, you know, do you have to check and verify? And I also thought it was interesting. He was saying that, you know, a lot of the technology, people don’t realize what you know. Unless you’re a video expert, they don’t realize that you know, that you know what they have isn’t sort of catching everything. So His example was, if you change a date stamp. That’s fine, you know, in terms of a deep fake, but you got to make sure you change like the 16 other date stamps that are all these other places. And I’m like, wow, this is, this is much more complicated than I thought it was going to be, but, you know, but the one thing he didn’t, he didn’t say what their accuracy rate was, I mean. And so I wish, I wish he would have talked

Greg Lambert 42:58
about that. Well, we’ll get on to Chad for not asking. That’s right, Chad, come on, Chad. All right. Well, that was all I had. Marlene, anything else you want to

Marlene Gebauer 43:11
No, I think that that was, that was a very good conversation.

Greg Lambert 43:16
Yeah, we I like doing this every once in a while. I think it’s good too. Yeah, so and so now we’re ready to get back on the train. Yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 43:24
we got, we got a few. Got a few in the in the hopper, coming up. So yeah, and

Greg Lambert 43:29
I’ve got double A, Double L, coming up in July 19 through the 23rd I think. And then you, are you doing? Ilta?

Marlene Gebauer 43:39
I don’t know what my schedule is at the moment. All right, yeah,

Greg Lambert 43:44
I think double A, Double L is the only thing I officially have until like November. So burn out, yeah, you know, you never know. Somebody may be listening to this podcast and go, Hey, we want you to come out to this conference. We

Marlene Gebauer 43:59
want you to come back to Hawaii and do it?

Greg Lambert 44:03
Yes, so I’ll see if Jenny silberger from the Hawaii Supreme Court will invite me back this this time, not a zoom call, but actually in person. So yeah, who can get us both on on there? So all right, well, thanks for sharing that and chatting with you. Always so

Marlene Gebauer 44:27
cool. Oh, we were so busy talking, I forgot that I actually have to do the outro. Wow,

Greg Lambert 44:34
that’s how long it’s been. I know

Marlene Gebauer 44:37
I forgot. Like, what are we supposed to be doing? Um, all right, so And thank you all for taking the time to listen to us here on the geek in review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d really love to hear from you. So reach out to us on LinkedIn. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry. David desika, thank you, Jerry. Thanks,

Greg Lambert 44:57
Jerry. All right. Marlene, I’ll

Marlene Gebauer 44:58
talk to you later. All right. Bye, bye, bye.