Associated Incidents
The world is an extraordinarily complex place. I feel like we've only just come to terms with the concept of images being photoshopped, and now AI deepfake voices and videos are making it difficult to trust anything. It's important to listen to that voice inside your head as one Ferrari exec did, as the company likely avoided a costly and embarrassing mistake by outsmarting the crooks in a deliciously ironic way.
Akio Toyoda can't blame AI for the loss of confidence in his company. No, friends, this is a classic case of a company doing too much too fast. Japanese car companies as a group are, generally, in a weird spot, which is why it's rumored that Mitsubishi is going to join the Honda/Nissan software alliance.
And, finally, let's end this episode of The Morning Dump with a bit of news about the upcoming Cadillac Celestiq.
How A Book Beat An AI Deepfake
The scene painted by this Bloomberg article is quite concerning. An unnamed executive at Ferrari gets a bunch of WhatsApp messages from CEO Benedetto Vigna saying a big deal is coming and utmost secrecy is required.
It's a little dicey, involves a lot of money, and must be kept secretive for the moment, according to the report. Vigna is using a different number because he doesn't want anyone to know. The exec should expect an NDA to sign ASAP.
Obviously, no one would want an exec to send a bunch of money because of an email and a WhatsApp message in the Year of our Logano 2024, but then a phone call followed from Vigna:
The voice impersonating Vigna was convincing --- a spot-on imitation of the southern Italian accent.
The Vigna deepfaker began explaining that he was calling from a different mobile phone number because he needed to discuss something confidential --- a deal that could face some China-related snags and required an unspecified currency-hedge transaction to be carried out.
The executive was shocked and started to have suspicions, according to the people. He began to pick up on the slightest of mechanical intonations that only deepened his suspicious.
"Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to identify you," the executive said. He posed a question: What was the title of the book Vigna had just recommended to him a few days earlier
I gotta say, this simple article has precipitated a flurry of thoughts in my brain.
First of all, great reporting by Bloomberg. Second, there are plenty of apps that exist to make a voice AI bot in about 11 minutes, and there's a lot of public audio from a CEO to make this work.
Third, the world is an exceedingly complex place full of digital bad actors. In the last couple of weeks, we've seen CDK Global hand over potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to hackers. Hell, even applying to a job at a parts store five years ago is risky!
Fourth, great work by the exec here to have the presence of mind to combat all of this.
Fifth, and finally, the irony of how this all was resolved is almost too perfect. Not only was an AI social engineering/deepfake attack repelled by a book, the book itself is so on-the-nose you'd think they're making it up: Decalogue of Complexity: Acting, Learning, and Adapting in the Incessant Becoming of the World
Here's the (translated) description:
Why does complexity always increase? What is the dilemma of complexity? What does it mean to dance with complex systems? What are the implications of the law of necessary variety? What is the connection between paradox and metamorphosis? These are some of the questions that this Decalogue seeks to answer. In the sea magnum of existing literature on complexity, ten topics treated in a synthetic manner can represent for the novice reader an opportunity to discover a fascinating theme and for the expert reader an opportunity to reread, with a different thread, key themes of the subject.
The book seems to specifically be about systems complexity as it relates to business, and, here, we see an example of how complexity (in terms of communications and business structure) almost contributed to a serious loss of capital. Wild stuff.