In the NYT: AI crosses the deepfake rubicon

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work
Soup cans in the style of Andy Warhol labelled "AI Slop" illustration by Allie Sullberg

I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today about my extreme distaste for Sora, the new social video app from OpenAI that was built to create and share fake videos.

“At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever left me feeling so pessimistic.”

This article started because a friend showed me Sora 2 and it immediately generated an extreme and visceral reaction in me that I hadn’t experienced before. 

I’ve seen many terrible technologies and dumb products over the course of my career, and met many objectionable people too. But watching Sora in action created a very specific sense of sadness and disgust that genuinely surprised me, and I wanted to understand more about it. And I know many other folks have struggled to pin down the disquieting, upsetting feeling that AI tools can generate, and so wanted to attempt to capture what it was that left me so hollow.

(If you want a more fun exploration of the same topic, may I recommend The Oatmeal’s view on AI art?)

As is always the case when you’re under editorial constraints like time and space, there’s so much more I wanted to say in the Times essay. But the essential point is there: Whether intentional or not, it is a malicious act to build a system that is designed to inject deepfakes into the body politic. 

(This is especially unpleasant when you combine it with a worryingly minimalist approach to safety. The irony of OpenAI calling its post about guardrails “launching Sora responsibly” at the same time it’s letting people generate deepfakes of everyone from Hitler to MLK was not lost on me.)

@thinkingsmarterwiser

These are the top 5 sora 2 mlk jr clips #fyp #top5 #sora2 #mlk #ranking

♬ original sound – SmarterWiserThinking

In the essay, I mention Stafford Beer’s dictum of “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Mentioning Beer, a somewhat peculiar British management professor from the 1950s, is the kind of thing that creates a certain response from some corners. It’s possible to nitpick or disagree with his approach or outlook, and I think his framework is extremely imperfect. But at its core, the lens is helpful: if a system keeps generating a particular outcome, it is essentially a system made to do that thing.

Cigarettes were once seen as a tasty indulgence; we now see them as cancer sticks. Modern political campaigns were ways to help affect wider societal change; now they basically are voracious, self-propelling engines for raising money. If Sora makes you second-guess what’s real and what’s not, that is in the most important way, what it is

.⌘

It’s worth saying in all this that I would not call myself stridently anti-AI. I tend to agree with the position outlined in Karen Hao’s excellent book Empire of AI, and recently outlined by Anil Dash in a shorter form: there are useful purposes for machine learning and deep neural networks, but this ain’t it. 

If you read Karen’s book, or Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, a searing overview of the thinking that drives many of these companies, you will get a detailed understanding of the negative costs of the current, hyperscale approach to these technologies. We know about the environmental and energy drains that huge new AI data processing facilities put on society. We know about the endless appetite for more input, with AI models gobbling up vast tracts of information and content, often illegally or against people’s expressed wishes. And we know about the exploitation of labor and traumatic experiences of staff who train these neural networks, essentially nudging it to produce something that is “right” only by themselves constantly watching things that are very, very wrong. 

And then, of course, there are the fundamental weaknesses of systems that don’t understand information but simply regurgitate it—machines that produce “hallucinations” and make factually incorrect statements with a glib and unearned confidence. 

My issue with Sora is that hallucinations aren’t a bug; they are the point. And so that’s why I was left so unmoored by watching it in action. 

You had all the power and the technology, and this is what you do with it?

⌘

One last note: I’m donating my fee for the article to the International Rescue Committee’s Gaza relief efforts. I admire a lot of what the Times does and many of the folks who work for it, but I also think it has taken the wrong stance on a number of important issues—not least the genocide against the Palestinian people. I don’t think a donation is really a satisfactory way to go about things, but it’s what I decided to do.

Podcast: North Korean sleeper cells

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience!

But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam.

(See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.)

I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job of explaining the way this attack works and its dangers.

Talking books, talking ideas

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, during our talk about the book in June 2025

For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. 

The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve a little more time in the spotlight… after all, the reality is that it’s really hard to promote new works, and most authors don’t get a ton of publicity and support from their publishers. 

We are closing in on 60 members who get a book each month, without any real promotion.

One of the added benefits for me is that the chance to interview the author of that month’s book. This happens often but not every time. We don’t actually have an interview this month—I was unable to make contact with Tim Clare, despite several attempts. But it did make me think about all the fun conversations I’ve had since starting this up. So I thought I’d share the interview archive here. 

Here they all are: I’ve grouped them by broad subject to help you see some common threads, although subject matter inevitably goes much further than these one liners can capture, and there are many more overlaps between the various interviews once you start digging in.

Our planet, past, present and future

Ferris Jabr on a holistic approach to earth science; Laura Poppick on the benefits of thinking about deep time; Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on maintaining hope in the face of environmental crisis.

The art of writing about history

Bonnie Tsui on mixing reporting and memoir; Carvell Wallace on the joys and difficulties of writing memoir; Adam Higginbotham on bringing history to life (part I, part II); Rebecca Nagle on digging up complicated stories. 

Technology and society

Alexis Madrigal on how the world has changed and what we can do about it; Karen Hao on what’s wrong with AI; Nicola Twilley on the way refrigeration has utterly changed our food and our lives; Henry Grabar on society’s terrible incentives around parking and cars.

Politics, policy and ethics

Annalee Newitz on propaganda and the culture wars; Nora Krug on illustrating a guide to resisting tyranny; Carl Elliott on whistleblowers; Lauren Markham on who benefits from the current migration system; Carly Anne York on the importance of engaging people about the value of scientific research.

Talking with these fantastic authors has been a real highlight of the last 18 months for me; I hope you get something out of these conversations too.

How a strange job interview turned into a journalistic investigation

May 6, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook
Simon Wijckmans, the CEO of web security company C.Side, wears a black baseball cap in a shadow profile photograph by Darrell Jackson

Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic.

On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined.

It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in fact gangs of cybercriminals working for the North Korean government who steal people’s identities and score high-paying remote IT jobs in the West and then send the money they earn (and data they steal) back to Pyongyang.

Seriously.

Security industry insiders knew about this, but the story hadn’t really reached the general public. And, at the same time, the problem is increasing. These fraudsters rely on tech, and they’re getting upgraded all the time: AI to cheat on coding tests; LLMs to fake the answers to interview questions; deepfake tech to get past ID verification; VPNs to dial in to work from overseas. But they also use old-school techniques, too, with accomplices who run their ground game for them—connecting their computers, filling in forms, sometimes even doing stuff like taking drug tests.

I figured this was a story that was so interesting I’d want to read more about it. Then I realized that I had the chance to actually write the story myself. So I embarked on a full investigation, and dug deeper. I talked to victims, experts, defectors. I even sat in on job interviews with North Koreans who were posing as Americans, using stolen identities and pretending they were in Ohio or Florida rather than China or Russia.

It touches on a topic that I’m fascinated by, which is the history of fakery—from the ancient world to the digital age.

The result was just published in Wired. Thanks to the team there, especially editors Sandra Upson and Rachel Morris—it was fun (and hard) to be out reporting again, and odd to be on the writer’s side of the desk rather than the editor’s. And lots of appreciation to everyone who was part of the story along the way.

Why I love rain

November 26, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Musings

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the sinister rain that comes before a thunderstorm, and the crackling kind that comes during one. You know rain because it is there, almost every day.

There are plenty of types of rain you’re not familiar with, of course. There is no monsoon and no typhoon. You don’t often get those driving, painful rods that come down for days. There is none of the swampy humid wet, not really, and there’s no place to find that steamy tropical drip that feels like being in a sauna.

But if you grow up in England, rain is just the thing.

They make jokes about it of course, but it’s one of those things that is worth joking about; the kind of thing that makes uncles lean over and say to you quietly: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

These days, living in San Francisco, rain doesn’t come very often. Yes, people always laugh about the city’s indecisive weather, its umpteen microclimates and the thick, sarcastic fog. And, yes, those things are real, but they are also a sleight of hand. San Francisco often gets wet, but it doesn’t rain much.

Sometimes “not much” means “not at all.” A few years ago we went without it for a long time. There were entire years of drought punctuated by incredible, angry rainfall that had no proper place to go and simply broke the dams and ran away back to the ocean. Drought is not so frequent right now, but the dry has retrained me. It’s made me forget—or at least lose any affection for—the endless days of foreboding skies, those weeks when you live your life under a heavy blanket.

These days I love a good heavy downpour, but I have grown distasteful of the little rains, that everyday kind. During the rainy season I’ll frown at the prospect of a chance of rainfall; once a year I’ll wonder if it’s time to buy Wellington boots. Where I used to go out without a coat, today I’ll throw on a waterproof coat at the merest sign of damp in the air.

It rained this weekend, real rain: an inch and a half on Friday alone.

We sat inside, enjoying the feeling of being locked in by the conditions. I thought about the smell of the wet leaves, of walking to school and pulling up my hood, of getting off the Tube feeling sweaty and cold at the same time. I remembered my grandfather in his old estate carving his way through huge roadside lakes to create arcs of water that cascaded onto the grass.

I stood in the garden tying back a branch of wisteria that had blown loose in the wind, my fingers frigid.

A flower in the garden of succulents outside the front of our house was coaxed out into the world, red and proud.

My shoes were muddy, and I felt like a kid again.

You had to be there

November 19, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Musings

The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November.

The news meant landed a little different for me, though: the start of a crashing wave of recollections—the kind of sudden, sharp memory zoom that leaves you a little disoriented.

Why was I thrown into this madeleine? Because I set up the Guardian’s first Twitter feeds approximately one billion years, two continents and many grey hairs ago. And I never thought shutting them down would be a news story in its own right.

They were simple things back in 2007, direct, unadorned and largely unsupported: a conveyer belt of headlines piped straight from the news feeds, built from unvarnished headlines and sometimes little comments. It took me just a few hours to set up the accounts and get them running, with some janky little logos and a very basic structure. There was @guardiannews, @guardiantech and a bunch more I think, and they gained followers rapidly: hundreds, thousands, millions in the end (although I’d handed over the keys long before.)

Like many things at the Guardian back then, the Technology desk was often the first place to try out new ideas. We ran with a nod from management, but felt like we were rogue operators. I was, perhaps, a sniffer dog looking for new platforms and ideas. Or—and this is more likely it seems now, with the benefit of perspective—a canary.

But it was fun.

The internet really was a wilder place then, less conforming, less sterile, more open and less abrasive. It felt beautifully unfinished. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and that was part of the attraction.

I’m currently reading Jeff Jarvis’s book The Web We Weave, which has some great examples of where we went wrong online, alongside a tub-thumping of what we can still get right. Its mixture of sadness and hope reminded me of an essay I helped edit back in 2015 maybe one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever worked on: The Web We Have To Save.

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger better known by the nickname Hoder, had been in jail in Tehran for six years for things he’d written online. We’d met once I think before his arrest, and after he was released a friend put us back in touch. He had a raw piece of writing he’d carved out of his head when he got out and saw how screwed up the internet—this place that he loved so much, that he’d been incarcerated for—was.

The piece took a lot of work from both of us to bring around, but it stands up a decade later. (It’s ironic that the piece is behind a paywall now, perhaps, but here’s a readable version.)

"The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites."

He was not wrong.

⌘

I still think about that story a lot, about what Hossein saw—what he knew—before the stream and after.

It’s all changed now, of course, changed even more than it had back then. Twitter long ago lost its shine for me, my posting slowed as the tone shifted; I stopped completely a few years ago when it was clear that things had taken a dramatic nosedive. And, as I said almost exactly year ago, I don’t intend to replace what I found on Twitter with something else.

Threads just seems like swapping one soul-sucking overlord for another. I remain skeptical of Bluesky for similar reasons, a Twitter alternative set up by people who were looking for a do-over because they screwed Twitter up in the first place (even if I understand that Jack Dorsey has perhaps nothing to do with it now.) Mastodon just feels like an ill-fitting pair of trousers, and LinkedIn is well, LinkedIn.

The Stream has me in its grasp, just like everybody else, but at least I don’t need to feed it any more. All I know is that we started a thing in 2007, and it lasted 17 years before somebody yanked its plug out of the wall. That’s pretty good going for a rainy afternoon’s work, I think.

Forensic storytelling

September 15, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Musings

Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal.

You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret.

The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a way that few other people understand, yet at the same time you don’t know them at all.

The descriptions are so minute, so detailed. The hair: how long is it and what color? The torso: is it fat or thin; does it have remarkable tattoos or scars or markings? The private parts: are they typical or somehow unusual?

Inside, there are reconstructions of the moment of death, and clues about how they died. An injury. Perhaps bruising or marking. Red eyes or broken teeth, a doctor divining the truth from the way the blood behaves.

There are other stories in the description, too: signs of somebody’s behavior, their past indiscretions, history evidenced through injuries and bones and the footprint of medical intervention or substance use.

Yet sometimes the things that we use to define us are entirely missing, uninteresting. Hair color might be noted, but the eyes? Their color is rarely important.

It’s even worse, somehow, when there’s a crime involved. A person dies once, usually suddenly and often unexpectedly, ripped out of existence by somebody else’s hand. Then somehow they are killed all over again by a doctor pillaging what’s left of them in the search for evidence.

I read an medical examiner’s report recently that broke me a little. A man, just a few years younger than I am, killed unexpectedly. There were twelve pages of information from the medical examiner, details of the autopsy and several paragraphs noting his injuries. The examination toured his body with the usual lack of emotion.

Parts of his body were deemed “unremarkable.” His hands, fingers, unremarkable. His feet, toes, toenails, unremarkable.

I thought about his toes in the ocean, wiggling as the cold water rushed over them. I thought about his hands touching a loved one, encouraging a child, consoling a friend. What’s unremarkable about that?

The mundane documents of science and bureaucracy have a way of flattening the most powerful things, reducing their dimensions. Being detached is their power, and their failure. If you look at research papers describing the most vile experiments, they seem barely different from the reports of an everyday scientist: Tuskegee explained in banal detail, thousands of men’s health and lives turned into data points. Or if you read court proceedings where officials are describing heinous acts committed against the most vulnerable, the forensic detail makes it seem almost commonplace, somehow inevitable.

I finished that autopsy report and sat for a few minutes, silent. What must life be like for the doctors and coroners and medical examiners? What does it do to a person to be so detached? How do we balance the important stories we can see from the meaningful ones we cannot?

“What is fair… and who decides?”

July 29, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Recommendations

Highly recommend Rose Eveleth’s Tested, a six-part podcast about gender verification in sport—and detailing the various ways in which sporting bodies have exerted their desire to categorize and control human bodies.

It’s well told, extremely relevant, historically fascinating, and full of twists and turns. But maybe the most impressive thing is how Rose makes the headlines personal by actually talking to the athletes who are affected by gender rules that treat them like freaks. Women like Christine Mboma, who are subjected to various methods of outside control simply because they do not fit somebody’s pretty arbitrary definition of womanliness.

Tested promotional image

Great athletes are often physically unusual: think Michael Phelps’s double-jointed ankles and gigantic wingspan, which were undoubted genetic gifts that played a part in his Olympic success. Or think of basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is very tall—at At 6’11”, he’s 14 inches taller than the normal American adult male—but has insane ball carrying capacity because his 30cm hands are even bigger, nearly 50% larger than the norm. Meanwhile Leo Messi’s in-built balance and unbelievable kinesthetic sense have aided his footballing genius, and he even took human growth hormone as a child because of growth deficiency. And yet nobody suggests these people should be banned from their sport for their differences, or take drugs to shrink their hands or seize up their joints.

Yet, as Tested carefully explains, that’s what happens to people whose bodies deviate from perceived “femininity” and get treated as if they are doping. During these days, when gender differences are under attack (and the show isn’t even about trans athletes, but it tells us a lot about the way people in authority react to those who do not fit precisely in the binary box) and as the Olympic games, it feels more relevant than it ever was.

I’m two and a half episodes through, and I’m all in.

What I did on my summer holidays

July 16, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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We just spent three weeks in the UK and Italy, and it was glorious. Family, mostly, plus a few friends, a little culture, a lot of food, and plenty of pizza and pubs.

On the quiet side we visited the Isle of Mull and the Suffolk countryside, and on the busy end we hit up Naples, Rome, Florence and London. We explored Pompeii and the Coliseum, we watched Shakespeare, lots and lots of football, and we even bumped into the Tour de France.

Some reflections.

Italian museums have amazing access to antiquities and yet were pretty uninspiring. We took a few guided tours of places of interest and enjoyed them all in various ways, but as spaces, the museums themselves felt entirely uninterested in giving audiences an understanding of anything.

We saw room after room of cases with barely any description or context, or confusing displays that gave no real information. In some cases it was impossible to find the things we were looking for. And nearly everywhere was obsessed with provenance, with telling us about the story of how this item came to be in this museum, which kings or princes had uncovered them, which museum director had overseen the acquisition. Meta history is OK, I suppose, but I want some actual history first.

I did get to see Galileo’s finger, though.

Context was also missing when we went to see a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe in London. It’s a funny venue with a peculiar audience, and a play that is increasingly hard to put on (each new approach seems to wrap the plot in an extra new layer in order to navigate around its ugliness.) The performances were solid to strong, but the staging more than a little strange. The performance was hard, though, I found the handful of abrupt twists and turns quite distressing. No spoilers, but it lurched forward in a couple of unexpected places.

It was only afterwards that Anna, a connoisseur of the stage, explained that it was a Brechtian performance: i know enough about Brecht that suddenly the aggressive tone and shock value made sense.

Now, I don’t need my art to bash me over the head or deliver its message simply, but I would never have put the pieces together without her help. Nowhere in the program or even the reviews did I get a hint of the epic approach.

(Then again, when the Kate character gave her closing monologue dressed as a rodent, I struggled with serious Roland Rat vibes—it was only after we left that I realized that she was literally dressed as a fucking shrew. So maybe my radar is just not working at the moment.)

Oh, and talking of failed reviews: one other noticing was that the tyranny of online ratings is now utterly complete. Every service, every hotel, every museum, every tour… they all asked us to review the experience online. Asking. Asking again. Pleading. Personally I try to avoid giving ratings myself except in exceptionally good or bad circumstances. That’s probably a good thing, because if I reviewed everything that I was asked to on this trip, it would be a full time job.

A new side project: Curious Reading Club

May 2, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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books / Work

A few weeks ago I announced a little hobby project that I’ve been working on: Curious Reading Club. I’d love it if you became a member.

The idea is pretty simple: I pick a terrific non-fiction book each month, send a copy to you, then we come together and talk with the author and each other. Membership costs $25 each month—that’s cheaper than the cost of buying the book itself—and you get a few little updates, author interviews, and other reading recommendations from me along the way.

Like I said, it’s a side project. I’m doing this because I thought it would be fun, and I hope that it can break even pretty fast and sustain itself. But if you want to know more about why I’m doing it, you can read more about why I’ve started the club here, or if you just want to get email updates, then you can sign up for the newsletter.

Our first monthly pick is A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham, a really interesting book that was released a couple of months ago about borders, migration, who gets to belong, and how we treat people who don’t qualify. If you sign up by May 15, a copy will shoot straight over to you.

We’re getting close to our magic 25 subscriber number, so if you want to join in then sign up for a monthly membership here.