Blackbird.AI

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Founded in 2014, Blackbird.AI uses artificial intelligence to detect harmful content online, and then notifies its business clients so they can formulate a response plan. Its Constellation platform analyzes conversations in 25 languages across social media, fringe websites, and the dark web, identifying emerging narratives before they have surfaced. For example, in February and March of 2020, Blackbird analyzed 50 million tweets about COVID-19 and found that 19 million contained “manipulation”—or attempts to shift mindsets by altering context or using influence agents like spamming tools, bots, and deepfakes. The company let its clients know which false narratives were gaining traction online early in the pandemic.<br />
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Blackbird has raised a total of $30.2 million, valuing the company at $80 million. The company says its customers include government organizations and Fortune 500 companies across the e-commerce and internet sectors. If a business suffers from a self-inflicted crisis—say, a cyberattack impacting consumer data—it can rely on Constellation to track responses from individuals and the media during its recovery. While it might take days for a public relations team to pinpoint the various narratives manually, Blackbird can identify them before they become mainstream, freeing up communications employees to strategize responses. To aid in this rapid decision-making, Blackbird’s AI assistant RAV3N Copilot recommends how to respond.

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Presenter: Wasim Khaled, Co-founder and CEO, Blackbird.AI

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Perception, Lies, and AI

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Hello, everyone. Great to be here today. My name is Wasim Khaled. I am CEO and co-founder of Blackbird. A I. Blackbird is a technology company that helps some of the world's largest organizations understand and respond to disinformation and misinformation. This is something that we're all dealing with on a daily basis and this is a very important week to be here discussing this topic. Now, I am here today to talk about perception, lies and A I. But before we do that, we're going to do a little experiment since I've got such a great crowd here today, I'm only going to tell you two things I'm about to play an audio phrase for you and it's gonna repeat, you have to take my word for it that it never changes. I'm also going to flash a couple of phrases on the screen. So ask yourself, what do you hear? Not, not politics. OK. Not big, not big. Yeah. Not, not all right. I saw a couple of reactions here. Let me tell you a little bit about what you just experienced that's called an auditory illusion. OK. What I did here was I knew something about how audio and visual stimuli is processed and I exploited that to mess with your head a little bit. Right now. Some of you might have even felt a little bit uncomfortable on that last screen. And there's a reason for that. It's because no one likes to be manipulated. And so when we talk about disinformation and misinformation, it's really not about what is true and what is false. It is about manipulation of the narrative and what we are experiencing in today's information ecosystem is nothing less than a battle of the narratives. What I've always thought about since 2017, when we founded the company, a cyberattack on human perception. Now, every organization has a narrative and every narrative has a counter narrative. Sometimes dozens of counter narratives. What everyone has to understand here, it is the conflict between the narrative and the counter narrative that creates an opening for threat actors to polarize communities and society against one another, but also to drive some sort of sometimes ideological or financial gain or motive. Now, people get sideswiped by what we call narrative attacks on an almost weekly basis. Now. So what is a narrative attack? So the way we define this is any kind of assertion in the information ecosystem that can drive harm against a person place or thing. Now, a thing could be something as innocuous as an hr policy or an ingredient in a product. But what you have to understand about a narrative attack is that a single post or comment can turn into something that creates immense damage, both financially and reputation threat. Actors are just waiting for this opportunity. They use every tool available in the toolkit to make sure that the narrative they want seen are seen by as many people as possible. Now they use bot networks, they use techniques to make sure that the online groups that maybe you want the least attention from are the ones you get the most attention from. They use generative A I to fabricate entirely work realities and they can do it fast. And these are not Black Swan events any longer. Since we started the company, you'd see one of these maybe once a year now, we see them almost every week. I'm sure you recognize some of these billions and billions of dollars of damage have been caused by narrative attacks. There's just a name for it. Now, we also have Gener DB I. So when it comes to generative A I, we see fabricated images being used by threat actors to create entirely curated narratives that they cannot tell the difference between false. And what I think is most important about this is it's low cost, it's scalable. And when you're on linkedin, seeing all the cool things that generative A I can do for your company know that these threat actors are also there watching and waiting and scaling their information operations campaigns. So it is no surprise. That the World Economic Forum has declared misinformation and disinformation, one of the largest global threats, the number one global threat in 2024 and this is across economic technological and societal categories. Now I spend a little time thinking about what is the accessible case study that I could show this audience to really help them understand how a narrative attack works. We're, as you can imagine in the midst of a lot of analysis for a lot of hairy topics and situations, geopolitical risk wars, vaccines, anti vax. But you know, there was one particular report that we put out that pulled me into more newsrooms that got me in front of more cameras than almost anything else. It's probably a hard one to guess. It's not wars, it's not vaccines. The Taylor Swift. OK. So, so stick with me for a moment here if you're not following some of the weirdness. Um A Guardian poll recently showed that one in five Americans believe that Taylor Swift is a government asset and a psy op. OK. Well, how did that come to pass? Well, it started with the usual suspect with a conspiracy theory in the dark web, moved to public telegram channels landed on social media, it then moved into the mainstream media and everyone started picking it up. I mean, this was a week before the Super Bowl. They needed to talk about Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift before anyone knew it, millions of people had been exposed to these narratives and to these conspiracies and you know, marketing 101, you see something seven times sinks in that's kind of how these work. But what was really happening in the information ecosystem, that's what's critical and that's what we focused on at Blackbird. So what you're seeing here is the information ecosystem as it was behaving during the lead up to that narrative, these jellyfish like structures that you're seeing here. It's what a narrative actually looks like if you have the ability to visualize it. This is our installation platform. The tentacles are actually connections between multiple narratives and sub narratives and counter narratives. It's a pretty big mess unless you know how to read it. Now, the red that you see here are actually bott like actors very important quality to understand. I'll talk a little bit more about why in a moment. This also enables you to pull out executive summaries to help you make strategic decisions across coms and threat intelligence in a host of other areas. Everything from insider threats to m and A our platform has been utilized to make stronger, faster decisions. Now, here you can see the narrative was almost 90%. The narrative risk bot like activity 25 ish percent important to know if there are bots propping up narratives. You might not want to take the bait and react to it today. You can make that decision and finally cohorts cohorts are like-minded tribes of online actors, the ones you might want to avoid. Now, here we saw NFL fans and Swifties coming to Taylor Swift's defense in the narrative. However, there were Russian state actors amplifying these narratives. Why is that? Well, as it turns out almost anything that gets enough eyeballs, you will have threat actors amplify those narratives, especially when you can polarize broader societal divides to create friction and ultimately erosion of trust. Now, not every brand is Taylor swift to be resilient like a narrative attack like this. When it hits you, you can't always bounce back and we've seen companies lose 20 $25 billion in a matter of weeks and they never really bounced back. Give you another example, Silicon Valley Bank. A lot of people call this the first social media driven bank run. Now, I want to be really clear if you had narrative intelligence to understand what was happening that week, it wouldn't have stopped the bank from failing. OK. That's it's a whole different topic. OK? However, let's say that you banked with Silicon Valley or you were partners or you were just looking to understand what was happening. You would have had a big, big early warning if you were able to understand what was really happening. Now, in this case, part of the narrative, it's just an interesting point. What you see coded in blue is a cohort that we label as anti capitalists, right? They were driving narratives that created a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, and that cohort will often appear in almost anything related to an M and a banking narrative, et cetera, right? And then when you dig in, you also see all of the cohorts the bot like activity and everything else that was happening within that ecosystem. All right, now, I want to be clear that constellation is a team that is a tool that teams like threat intel analysts and coms teams can use to better make decisions. We're also going to talk about one more tool that we have in just a few minutes that anyone can use. I also want to talk a little bit about deep fakes and generative A I now I hear from our customers on an almost regular basis that they want to understand if there's deep fakes out that are manipulating their narratives, that's an important thing to understand. But in a world where almost everything is going to have some amount of analysis or manipulation by generative A I using legitimate tools by the way, it could be, you know, office 360 or all of the tools that integrate gen A just knowing it's gen A I is not enough. Let's assume that all the content is going to have a percentage of gen a analysis around it. It's important to know more, more so how that deep fake impacts the public and how far it's spread. Because if a deep faith falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it. It may not be worth responding to tools, make this very easy things like this. I'm going to show you some magic the real thing. I mean, uh it's all real. It takes 1020 seconds of video, a social media post with audio and you can generate something like this in a matter of minutes. Anyone can do it, But you have to also see how it moves through networks. No, you may be wondering, is my organization susceptible to these types of attacks? Can we see these things coming? I mean, I'm just going to tell you after talking to hundreds of organizations for the past 67 years, more than likely you're not going to see it coming. And our customers are always asking us, are we next? There's three questions you can ask maybe if you're a CEO or a board member or someone who is in charge of communications, you ask these three questions to your customers the first, if we are under attack, how will I understand the contagion, like effect of narratives, how fast they're spreading, particularly when they're mutating and evolving? Then how am I going to understand which of those narratives are bot driven synthetically amplified? You all are probably familiar with share of voice. Well, you have to be worried about synthetic, share of voice and finally who and what are the hyper agenda driven groups that are propping up this narrative and are are they collaborating which can cause even more harm to my organization if you can't understand these kinds of risk signals today? Fast at the moment of crisis, you are fighting blind. All right. So high fidelity, high resolution technology must be deployed. I know I've thrown a lot out today and it can sometimes seem insurmountable or daunting when you hear this all at once, particularly if you're not really looking at this space. In fact, it's been said that we as a species have primitive brains, medieval institutions and godlike technology. There has never been a time where that is more true. We've seen it this week almost more than we have in the past 67 years in kinetic warfare in cyber warfare. And now in information warfare defense has always trailed offense. It might even feel like whack a mole sometimes. But if you have nothing in place to defend your organizations and frankly yourself against manipulation, you will not be safe. Thank you very much.

Wasim Khaled believes that “human beings are not yet ready” for the warped realities that can be spread through harmful AI. Compass, a “context product” launched by Blackbird, uses gen AI to help people check posts and other online media for misinformation and disinformation.

Blackbird.AI CEO on helping humans stop harmful AI

Illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Blackbird.AI.

Leadership

Compass, a “context product” launched by Blackbird, uses gen AI to help people check posts and other online media for misinformation and disinformation.

So I see what are people missing. What's the one headline that we're not seeing about A I? There are so many headlines out there about A I, I'm trying to think which one is not really being covered. I think the one that I would like to see and we're seeing a little bit more play there is that the degree to which A I can be used for good versus evil is not based on the morality of the A I, but in the morality of the user, it is a human problem, not an A I problem. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, what does Blackbird A I do for me? So if we are equipping uh analysts and uh threat intelligence teams to get a better sense of what are the mechanisms behind this narrative attack. So most people perceive that as something that just happened and we show them, OK, there might be a bot network, for example, that was deployed, that is amplifying and driving the reach of that particular narrative. And if you think about it, every organization has a narrative and every narrative has a counter narrative. And so it is the seeding of all of these counter narratives that are tearing down the messaging that that company wants to put out there in the world uh that we really enable them to see. So I think what keeps you up at night when it comes to A I, I would say it's not just A I, but it's the application of A I to harmful acts, particularly in our space that is about warped realities. And uh I would say that the biggest problem today around those work realities and the utilization of A I to drive them is that as a society, human beings aren't yet ready to question every single thing that they see, whether I not even just see but see, hear uh read. And so the fact that we have to question our reality on everything that we look at and try to perceive is extremely disturbing. And I think about also what our younger Children, you know, I'm, I'm a father and, and I think about like the world that they're growing up in without that appeal to be able to know uh if what they're seeing or looking at is artificial or manipulated. And so that concerns me and that's really why we do what we do keeps me up to. There is reason to be hopeful because the same types of technologies that frankly are making the problem worse can be used as a, as a defensive measure or a kind of illuminating uh product as well. February 14th is Valentine's Day. Actually, we're launching a product. It's something we call compass. Uh we call it compass because it helps you see the way a little bit more. It is a context product. And so you can give it a question, you can give it a link or a post or a meme or even a link to a video and it will use our generative A I models and all of the risk signals we've developed for our enterprise customers around bot activity and, and, and harmful communities. And it will tell you as much non biased kind of two sided context along with sources and, and where that came from as well as summarizing points like a, like a chat GP T and uh and, and we think that's something that could be incredible for people who help the average person discern the truth. Why put it out on Valentine's Day? Is there a message there or is it a coincidence? It is for the love of what we do?

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