How AI’s New Millionaires Could Reshape Philanthropy

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[00:00:33] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, June 16th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. AI is already showing up on the campaign trail as new tools make it easier to create freakishly convincing deep fakes. We'll hear from the co-founder of one of the world's leading voice cloning companies about how it's trying to combat election misinformation. Plus, nonprofits are hoping new riches tied to massive AI IPOs will lead to new benefactors.

[00:01:03] We'll look at how the next wave of tech IPOs could reshape the charitable sector. But first, the technology behind AI-generated voices is improving rapidly. And with the U.S. midterm elections quickly approaching, so are concerns about how the tools could be misused. From fake robocalls to fabricated candidate endorsements, experts have warned that realistic voice clones could become a powerful tool for spreading misinformation.

[00:01:32] UK-based conversational AI company Eleven Labs, which was valued at $11 billion this year, says it's working to stay ahead of the problem. Last week during London Tech Week, co-founder Maddie Staniszewski spoke with her colleague Luke Vargas about the risks and possible solutions. We're five months out from the U.S. midterms. Obviously, a fake AI voice in a presidential election is very concerning, but there's two candidates, right? People kind of know these figures.

[00:02:00] The midterms, hundreds of races, right? State, local, many more potential voices that could be spoofed to give someone an edge. How are you going to try and stop that? So on the Eleven Labs side, all the content is watermarked. We moderate content. We block voices. So you cannot even create those voices. Even if you are lookalike, you cannot do that. So you're completely blocked from any method of trying to create that voice today. Based on the content of what someone wants to have a voice say, is that how would you block?

[00:02:28] If I just want to have a voice that happens to sound like my opponent in a race saying they endorse so-and-so. Yeah, so you need to create that voice. So we effectively detect similarity to the voice of one of the candidates and block it. Does that candidate have to upload their voice in to say... No, we make sure that this is the case for all those elections events. That's good. Like all these races? I'm just curious how deep that penetrates. Is it just senators and governors? Are we going down?

[00:02:56] If someone wants to protect themselves as a candidate in a local race, a state race, can they reach out to you? Yeah, we can collaborate with anyone. Of course, on the Eleven Labs side, we feel confident that it's going to be good. But then the wider side, and that's where we see most of the models, there's open source technology, there's wider set of technology that can do that without any safeguards, any provenance, any mechanism. And that's where, frankly, I am worried of how this will evolve. We are trying to collaborate with UK, US AI security institutes to protect against this.

[00:03:26] Our love for watermarking to be an requirement for people to adopt. But our biggest competition today is from Asia, from companies that don't follow any of those rules. This was the case with fake video and photos in the last election, right? That Adobe is saying, hey, we watermarked this stuff, you can spot it. But if you're not using that platform, then have at it, right? Create something and cause chaos. I know we can do more. We are collaborating on releasing a lot of the detection models to that ecosystem. We collaborate with both universities and governments on creating that.

[00:03:55] And I think there needs to be, back to one of the parts, there needs to be a unified layer of detecting for human, detecting for AI, and then assuming everything else is false to be able to combine the promise and the benefit of technology with the bad actors that will always try to abuse it. It sounds risky because you know how good those bad actors' technology is, right? These open source, you have a product that I know you're proud of, and that has a lot of differentiating features from open source voice models. But their voice tech is pretty good, right? And it could be used for ill.

[00:04:22] It's pretty good. However, I both feel we will get there quickly enough of the society to be able to protect against those bad actors. And ultimately, from our partners, our customers, there's the same ambition to get the benefit but protect against the bad. That was 11 Labs co-founder Maddy Staniszewski speaking with our colleague Luke Vargas. Have you ever seen a post on your social media feed that you thought was real, only to later realize it was AI-generated? We want to hear from you. What did you see?

[00:04:51] Why did you believe it? How did you feel afterwards? Shoot an email to tnb at wsj.com, or leave us a voicemail at 212-416-2236. That's 212-416-2236. Or if you're a listener on Spotify, drop us a comment in this episode. You may hear yourself on the show, and we may reach out to you to hear more about your experience. We hope to hear from you.

[00:05:19] Coming up, AI IPOs are creating a growing class of millionaires. But the biggest winners might not be who you think. More on that after the break. Football doing your head in this summer? Well, L'Oreal Paris has your back. Or should we say your hair? Because every missed goal, foul, penalty, and minute of extra time, and don't even get us started on VAR, leads to stress.

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[00:06:22] key consideration for employees who suddenly find themselves in a very different income bracket. San Francisco donors already give more than three times the national average to charity, according to Fidelity. But the sheer scale of wealth being created by AI could usher in a new class of philanthropists with a distinct point of view. WSJ reporter Keach Hagee joins us now to explain. So Keach, we've seen tech fortunes create massive philanthropic efforts before,

[00:06:49] from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg. What's different about this new generation of AI wealth? Well, partly it's just the scale of it. It's just so much money. But also it's about the technology that is creating the wealth. AI is different than what came before. And the people that are interested in AI are often younger. And there's a good number of them that see the development of artificial general intelligence as something that's going to happen really soon. And for some of those folks, it's important to get their wealth out into the world

[00:07:17] as soon as possible because, you know, money might not even matter once AGI happens. Can you give us a sense of scale here? Just how much money are charities expecting to flow their way? Yeah, we've talked to experts who say that we could be looking at not just billions, but tens of billions of dollars flowing into charities. Do we have a sense yet about where specifically this money may be going or what types of charities? We don't know. But there is a lot of overlap between this world of effective altruism and some

[00:07:45] of these AI companies, particularly OpenAI and really anthropic is like the one most closely associated with it. Historically, some of the key founders of that movement, some of them actually work at the company now. So it's sort of expected, we don't know that a good amount of the money will go to charities that use this lens for how to decide where the money should go. A lot of that stuff means going to global poverty, going to AI safety, animal welfare. These are some of the really popular

[00:08:10] issues that effective altruists in the past have supported. So it's a good guess that a lot of it might go there, but we don't know yet. You mentioned effective altruism. Can you explain what that movement is and what does it mean for charities right now? It's sort of a data-driven cousin of utilitarianism that is powered by this idea of earning to give. So you can take a really high-paying job and the important thing is to use that money to go toward charities and specifically charities

[00:08:36] that are effective. So your dollar goes the absolute farthest that it possibly can. And you're kind of using like math and data skills to assess that. And a lot of the people who developed AI are close to this movement or sort of adjacent to it, especially those who built the company's OpenAI and Anthropic. Your story mentions that the seven founders of Anthropic plan to give away about 80% of their wealth. How unusual is it for founders to pledge to donate the majority of their wealth?

[00:09:06] We do have this famous thing of the founders' pledge, right? The giving pledge that folks like Bill Gates have signed. But broadly speaking, for this kind of wealth, you know, 80% is a lot. And to do it right at the outset of becoming wealthy at the very beginning of an IPO is really new for it to be happening at this scale. Your story says that a lot of the giving will probably flow through donor-advised funds. Can you walk us through exactly what those are and why they are so popular?

[00:09:35] So a donor-advised fund is a place where you can, as a donor, put your money and get the tax benefit right then, that year. And then it's up to the fund to decide where it goes. And things could sit in the fund for a good long time, but you get the tax break up front. So it's a really attractive way of giving for donors who aren't totally sure exactly where they want every penny to go, but they know, broadly speaking, they want to put it into charity. So is tax break first, cause second? Yeah, basically.

[00:10:05] Why is it important for us to look at the impact of philanthropy from these AI companies? I think the past waves of tech IPOs have really reshaped the world that we live in. If you think about like the Gates Foundation, right? I mean, that's had a massive impact on global health in the global South, infectious diseases, things like that. And that was really, you know, Microsoft money. And if you look even at the Facebook IPO, that gave us a whole world of philanthropy by Mark Zuckerberg,

[00:10:32] but also co-founders like Dustin Moskowitz, who've helped build the entire infrastructure of AI safety, which has really shaped this AI revolution that we're in right now. So this new way could see a whole new generation of philanthropists on that scale. Folks who don't just give money to like do good, but are really reshaping society along the issues that are important to them. Yes, we've seen a big IPOs before, but this could really change the entire like texture of culture in those places.

[00:10:59] That was WSJ reporter Keach Hagee. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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