How High School Teens Are Fighting AI Scams & Deepfakes | The Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. You're now watching B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast hosted by Allen Kopelman, powered by Nationwide Payment Systems, the number one solution for payment processing. Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. We talk about business, entrepreneurship, AI, financing. Finances, everything to do with money, business, and all the things going on in the, in the world of business and entrepreneurship. And today we have some special guests on the show. My friend Dale Lassik from The Green Sheet recommended Sanvi, right? Sanvi?

Yeah.

And Adya. And they have a project called the AI Literacy Project. And they are educating people about things about AI, educating students, educating senior citizens, which I think is both of those are super, super important. I know my mom has gotten fake phone calls. I mean, we're dealing with, you know, phishing, and I'm not talking about where you catch a fish, or ph, that phishing, scams and all kinds of things. So that's what we're going to dive into and talk about today. So why don't you decide who goes first and introduce yourselves to the audience, and then we'll get into the questions.

Okay.

Hi guys, I'm Audia. I'm a junior in high school. Um, Sonby's in my grade. Um, and we started this project pretty much last year. We also have a club at our school that kind of goes along with this, our Ethical AI Club. Yeah, and we're really excited to be here.

All right. Yeah, I'm Sanvi. I'm also a junior at Aragon High School, and I'm the vice president of the club that we started. And yeah, we're happy to be here. Thank you for having us.

Okay, so you guys started a club. It's great to have young people on the show and talk about something that's, you know, affecting society right now, like AI. So what is the club? Explain, like, what is the club doing?

So in the club, we meet once a week, um, and we have like maybe 10 to 15 people, um, and we just talk about— we just kind of have like discussions, open-ended discussions about issues with AI. Um, yeah, and the motivation for starting this project was we really liked the impact we were having with the club, but we felt like that wasn't like enough, because obviously it's great talking to some high schoolers, but we really wanted to expand our reach too.

So who do you got? So you mentioned when we were— before we jumped on the podcast about educating, um, senior citizens. So talk about that a little bit.

I think we haven't had much experience yet with educating senior citizens. It's mainly been with presenting to kids ages from 2nd grade to 8th grade. But we're working with different senior citizens.

Yeah. So we're also working with— We're working with our local police department because they have a program that they already run where they educate senior citizens about internet safety in general. And we're partnering with them so we can bring our AI aspect into that. Um, yeah, and we have a few scheduled, so we're really excited about—

well, that's, that's important. You know, I was telling you guys, my mom gets like telephone calls, oh, I need to send $500, your grandson is in jail. My mom calls me like on my cell phone like, no, no, just hang up on those people. Like, this is just, it's a scam. And you know, the scams today are costing people billions and billions of dollars. And, you know, the, the targets of scams are usually young people and older people are the biggest targets.

It's like so hard to tell now too. It just— these scams are so realistic.

Yeah. So tell me, like, what's an AI scam that you guys have seen that's really upsetting?

Um, okay, we both have younger sisters, so this isn't really like a scam, but my sister really likes to watch YouTube, and on her YouTube she just like gets all these obviously fake videos, but she's 8 years old, so she sits here and she like believes them. Like, there's one video where there's like a soap dispenser and then the bubbles like turned into some like tiny animal. I think it was a cat. And she was telling me, she was like, we, we need to get a soap dispenser like this. I was like, Uma, that's really clearly AI. But then she didn't even know what AI was when I said that. And she was like, how could it be fake? It's a video. And we went back and forth for a bit. Yeah, those types of things happen a lot.

I think so many kids just don't really want to believe that it's fake because they look so real and then they're just so shocked when they're told that it's not real.

And it creates this magic for them.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely, you know, I make— I've made some AI videos with Sora. That's, you know, the OpenAI thing. And I made a video of my dog, and he was out— I probably could— he's sitting, he's sitting and he's next to a rabbi, and he's getting his bark mitzvah as a joke. And people thought— they were like, oh, they said, who's that rabbi? And I was like, that's an AI video. Come on, you guys getting faked out by this kind of stuff. It even has the Sora watermark there. So, oh my God, yeah, people don't— a lot of, you know, there's a lot of, um, upset with AI. Like, even in my business, payment processing, we get companies that come to us, they go, we have this AI software, and then we're like, well, we have to test it before we can let you start taking money from people and make sure, you know, of two things. A, that it works. And B, that it can't do anything harmful. And one of the, a couple of the, the couple of those things that we looked at recently, you know, and I'll get your opinion on this, you know, we told them, we said, you know, we can't help you. You created an AI that's using prompts to create a video and it can create adult content. And we're like, you're going to let a teen, you're not going to, you have to age gate it because What would happen if, like, somebody, a 12-year-old learns, they learn how to, everybody's learning how to prompt now. Like, are they teaching that in high school, prompting for AI?

They're actually not. They, like, in our high school, they just tell us don't use AI, it's bad. I remember on an English essay, they just told us, they made us write the whole thing in class because they didn't even trust us to write it at home.

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They, they had, they thought that some of us might use AI and it's such a real risk now. And I think a lot of teachers are just really scared of it. Um, but we want to teach students that it's not all bad. Like, of course there's so many, there's so much harm it poses, but there's also some— it's such a powerful tool that if used right can help, can help them grow and can help them learning.

Yeah, help their learning as well. It's like really any tool, like, like the internet too. Obviously you can go on the internet and you can do bad things on the internet, but if you're taught how to navigate it safely, if you're taught like the best use cases for AI, um, like Sondi was saying, it's not all bad. But a lot of teachers especially, they're just— I feel like they they are scared. And I mean, it is a valid risk to some extent, but I think that can be mitigated if there's education around how to use AI properly and things like that.

I mean, people can use AI to do like all their homework and then, yeah, you know, and then they're not learning anything except how to use AI to do that homework. That would have been good for me. I was a horrible student.

Oh my God.

So, you know, if I could have took my math homework and stuck it in ChatGPT.

I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely great to like have a tool that's able to explain my homework to me because like, I love my math teacher, but like, I don't understand sometimes what he's explaining or I just zone out. Maybe that's my fault, but I like when I'm doing my homework, I'll be like, how do I do this problem? And then I'm like, I get this personalized tool that's able to just help me and personalize the, explanation to me, and it's really great.

Yeah, it's literally just like a personal assistant, like available to use whenever we want. It just, it can be really helpful sometimes when we don't really understand what's happening in school, even for us too.

So do you think that children, you know, teenagers and even younger, you're saying like you're, you have a younger sister, do you think there's, that it's being overused by people, like asking it questions instead of asking your parents or asking your older sibling? And kids are going on these, you know, everybody's got a phone now, right? They can pretty much talk to it, just talk into the phone and then get an answer. Do you think it's being like overly used?

I think there's—

I don't—

I'm sorry.

Sorry, go ahead, Tommy.

Oh yeah, I don't think so because I feel like a lot of kids, I mean nowadays they don't really know. They don't like, at the most they only have, they use ChatGPT or Gemini and they don't really use it for much, just homework. But I don't think they have 'Cause it's still a relatively new thing. I don't think they have that much familiarity with it.

But I think like people our age, I feel like habits form a lot in middle school. This is what Sami and I are talking about the other day. Like elementary schoolers, it's like, sure, they use it, but we don't feel like that's like an issue, at least yet. But with students that are like middle schoolers, or AI came out when we were pretty much in middle school or beginning of high school, and it's like some people in our class we feel like are just really reliant on AI. They ask, they ask it to write like emails for them that they like, two-sentence emails they can write on their own, or they, they'll copy and paste the entire assignment from AI. So that's definitely a problem, but that's like a problem that can go away with taking away the stigma around AI because we're told that it's like this forbidden tool and obviously that makes so many people just want to use it more. But yeah.

So what kind of things are you— so are you like doing any educational things in school where you're talking to the other students besides the people in your club?

Not in our school, but we've been going to like, like I mentioned, middle schools in our area, elementary schools. Yeah. And we're working on like, we're working, we're trying to work with the superintendent of the district so we can have further reach.

Yeah, we've also gone to like a few different scout troops, this leadership organization for kids, and it's just our presentations are like tailored to our specific audiences. Like if we presented second or third graders, for example, we make it more kid-friendly and easier to understand with more graphics. But then for if we're presenting to middle schoolers, it's more, a little bit more technical into like how AI works.

Yeah, because I know there's like, I get like these AI text messages. I'm sure they're from some sort of robot. And they're trying to like get money out of me, or they ask like a question, hey, how are you? They try to like trick you into a, a conversation, and you know it's not a person. They don't have time to sit there and text 1,000 people, right? So somebody's programmed some kind of robot. So do you like warn people against like interacting with like phone numbers that they don't know and things like that?

Yeah, we have a section in our presentations about like just safety, right? And we talk about the basics on internet in general, like not sharing personal information and stuff. But then we also have a specific thing about like AI-related scams, like deepfake photos, videos, and like text messages that you can get, scam calls, things like that.

So what do you advise? Like, so give me an example of like a scam and what do you advise? The people to do?

One thing— you're like— one thing we do is we have like a deepfake photo and we have them try to figure out which aspects are fake, like why it's fake. And that encourages them to think more critically about whether something's real or not, we hope. And then we obviously wrap it up by saying like, make sure you're asking yourself, does this come from a reliable source? Like, it's a text message, and like, what's it asking me to do? Is that— could that be putting me in danger? Things like that.

Yeah, we also show like the younger kids, we tell them that, yeah, AI can look real, but it's also— if it looks too crazy to be true, it probably is. And we show them to look for clues like unnatural blinking or weird shadows and teach them that if they see consistent signs of that, then it's probably a deepfake.

Yeah, I had somebody get on a Zoom call with me and they actually tried to run like some kind of robot program that was talking and it was not a real person. Like, they were talking, but it was the robot in a different voice with a different picture. And I was like, what the heck is this? I just said, you're a scammer. Like, get the hell away from me.

I saw a video where there's like this guy and they asked him to put like two fingers in front of his face or something, and he's just refusing to do it because it was like an AI-generated guy.

Yeah, because I, I'll tell people that that's what I did. I said, oh, wave to me like this.

And oh yeah, and they can't—

they couldn't do it. And I was like, yeah, this is some— this is some fake AI thing like the guy's like putting together. I don't know I mean, I wish people would stop doing all this stuff with the, with the fake AI stuff and, you know, like video creation for AI. I mean, I heard Sora was going to shut down, and I heard that too. There's some other ones that are also going to shut down, and then people are trying to make these AI prompting video— these AI prompts— prompting video programs and You know, we've explained to them, like, what would you do if, you know, you let a teenager get on there and they made prompts and then they made some kind of adult content with nudity, right? They send it to their friends, right? And they put a picture, a head of a girl in their class or a guy, right? Then some parent finds it. I go, you know what's going to happen to you? They go, what? I go, the cops are going to come to your house and lock you up. Because you created this thing that can do— that can cause harm to people. And I think it's, you know, it's, it's kind of— that those kind of things are really dangerous, like taking somebody's head. I mean, you can do it with like Photoshop, but it's, it's getting out of hand now with like video. What do you guys think about that?

Yeah, that's definitely a big problem. It's like, um, like you mentioned, like obviously you do it with Photoshop, but it's so realistic now you can create these fake videos, and that's a huge problem. I think we're hoping that our program helps to teach kids how not to use AI. Obviously, that would be one way not to use AI. We mentioned like, don't use it to harm people, but like, we're also hoping that AI systems will— as AI continues to grow, we're hoping that the systems will have more like guardrails in place.

Yeah, they definitely need to put some age guardrails and, yeah, content guardrails on, on AI. So like, in your— in the school, like, to me, I'm out of high school a long time, so— and, um, so like, in high— in school, do they teach— do you guys have classes? Like, are they teaching you like how to code, computer programming? Like what's going on with things like that?

I mean, we just, we only have really two classes about computer science. It's just an intro to computer science and then AP Computer Science A, but we don't really have any classes about like AI or machine learning. Um, and then the teachers, their mindset, they're, it's all pretty similar. Just no, don't use AI at all, which is very discouraging for a lot of students. And then a lot of students like, think that, oh, AI is bad and like we, we don't want— like, especially at an early age, if they're told that to not use AI, then they just think that AI is bad in all aspects. And we don't want them to develop that mindset either.

What were you going to say, Ada?

Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, like somebody saying we have two classes that actually offer anything to do with computer science coding, but those are also like optional. Like a lot of kids just don't end up taking it because that's not their field of interest. So we really aren't made aware of it at all.

Do they, do they teach like in high school, like how to use like Microsoft programs like Excel and things like that, doing accounting work? None of that?

No. My computer science teacher last year when you were in that class, he like taught— or this year I'm his teacher's aide and he like taught me how to use a spreadsheet for some things. But like, no, not other than that.

I really think they just expect us to know. I think in, I think in schools today, when I look at, you know, kind of like skills that I had to learn as an adult, I mean, obviously it wasn't around when I was in high school in the 1970s, so, you know, I could be your prior grandparents. So, so, you know, I'm 65 and you guys are teenagers, so my kids are in their 30s. So, you know, in, in school, when you look at, when I look like the future of what people need to learn. You know, besides that, we have a shortage of, in the trades, of fixing things like air conditioners, plumbing, electricians, and things like that. A lot of those jobs require people to have a really strong understanding of math and science. But also, you know, in the world of work, you know, to get jobs outside of— Need to get paid faster? Smart invoicing from MPSOne gives your customers an instant way to pay. Or credit card with automated reminders and no friction. Try it today. Link in description to book a demo. You know, being a waiter working in a fast food restaurant, you really need to have a lot of business skills. And that's one thing, you know, like I get— I talk to— I've talked in schools before and I'm like, yeah, people need to understand like what it is about how to operate a business and how to budget. And I remember, like, my kids didn't— I had to teach them myself. I was like, okay, this is a checkbook and a bank account. And they had to learn all about, like, everything, everything around that, you know, economics and how it works and things like how to use Microsoft programs. Because when you go get a job, like, in an office, you have to understand how to, how to do things like that. What do you guys think about that? Kind of stuff.

I think schools really are lacking in like a lot of real-world skills that they're teaching us. Like you're saying, there's just so many things that we have to guess on. And like Sonby was saying, they just expect us to know, or they, I guess, expect it, or I guess they don't see it as important to teach us. But I definitely think, I definitely think AI is one of those things that we can't avoid and not teach, especially as it's getting bigger. It like went from a few years ago being just this like completely out of this world, like, like something that didn't seem possible. And now it's just you search something on Google and you have an AI summary and it's like growing so quickly and it's only going to keep growing and just it's already pretty much everywhere, but it's going to go to so many more places. It's important. To not ignore it.

So if you had to say one good thing that AI is doing to help you in your life, I'll let each of you answer. Tell us, tell me one good thing.

I think for me, one good thing is AI is able to make concepts I have trouble with in school or like outside of school. If I ask AI to explain it, it's able to explain it in a way that makes sense to me and I can ask follow-up questions. I think that's really good. It's helping me even my understanding with a lot of topics.

Yeah, I think for me too, like finals and AP exams are coming up and it's just, it's just been really good at helping me like creating study plans and study guides efficiently. And I feel like I'm actually like learning more and developing my skills. So I think I'm going like prepared for these AP exams and finals coming up.

Well, yeah, definitely. I, I guess, you know, more like self— like using it yourself is helping you learn more, being more independent in, in your thinking to, to do that. So what's, uh, the most harmful thing besides fake videos and scams? What kind of harmful things do you see going on with AI that's— that people watching this video, whether you're an adult or a teenager, right? Who's— what, what do you see as the one of the biggest dangers?

I think the, the fact that it's like not right a lot of the times, but you want to believe it. Um, it can just like— just, I was gonna say look you in the eye, but I guess you can't do that. But it can just like spit some straight, like, nonsense, and then it just tells you like, yeah, it's true. And sometimes I'll be like, can you double-check that? It's like, yeah, I just double-checked it. Oh, my bad, I was wrong. But it's like a lot of people don't ask it to double-check. They don't try to verify the source, and then it's just spreading misinformation.

Yeah, I think it's also like, besides the misinformation, it's also easy to forget that it's it's not a human and that chatting for a long time about things that you might talk about with your friends, it's not really healthy. It's definitely not an alternative for talking with your friends. Even if it does provide you with a lot of useful information, you should still take breaks, go outside, take a walk. Yeah.

Yeah.

When I was a kid, that's all we did. We went outside, we came back in when it's time for dinner. We didn't have video games. So what's— and now you're in high school, so what, what do you want to study in college? Or what do you see, like, your, your— what would be your, like, dream job? Like, you go to college, you come out of college, and what is your dream job? And I'll just tell you a quick story. So I went to college, but I dropped out. I went and I became a chef, and I became an executive chef of a hotel. And then I started this— worked in that field for over 20 years, and then started a payments company in 2001. So for 25 years running a payments company and doing this podcast for a little over 3 years. And my kids— my daughter was going to go to college for chemistry. She changed to meteorology. And today, besides, she's a big Caitlin Clark fan. I don't know if you know who that is, the basketball player. We have her all over here in the podcast.

No, yeah, we're fans of basketball too.

And, uh, so my daughter's a chief meteorologist at CBS 2, Fox 28 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she's on television every morning educating people, telling people what the forecast is going to be and and reporting on tornadoes and all kinds of crazy stuff. And my son, he's a general manager for PacSun at a clothing store. Well, I'm sure you guys like PacSun, right?

Yeah.

Okay, you have to come to Florida, you know, and he'll take care of you, get you the hook. But, uh, but what do you guys see like it, you know? That, like, I made a big, you know, second career change. My daughter switched from chemistry, which she did AP chemistry in high school, all of a sudden to go into journalism and meteorology. And, you know, she actually did a television program on the Discovery Channel, uh, 2 years ago. So where do you guys see in your future? What's coming up?

Honestly, um, right now I'm thinking a lot about like college and I want to study something related to this. Like I've been interested in computer science and also with the rise of AI, like I want to find some sort of major that's able to like combine the two. And then, yeah, I don't know. Right now I'm like interning for a company and they specialize in deepfake detection. So something like that would definitely be interesting, but I'm not completely sure after college whether I want that to be my career.

Yeah, you have to think of my daughter. She used to love the weather when she was, when she was younger, and she liked, she liked, uh, I even have a video of her when she was probably in elementary school at a local fair, and the TV station was there, and she got up in front of the green screen and had to do like a fake weather report. It was pretty funny. And then there she is, she's doing it for real now. She's a chief meteorologist, one of the few women in the United States to achieve that. Because it's mostly male-dominated. So, Saanvi, what do you see in your future?

Yeah, just like Aldia said, I'm also kind of like exploring my options, but I think I am really passionate about machine learning and AI and computer science, and I do want to do something like work around, do something similar to building these AI systems. And I think like being a part of the AI Literacy Project and presenting to kids, I now I see that the most important part isn't really like the AI part of AI, but like more of the human impact. Like, I now know that I can be building a system that maybe like a middle school might be interacting with tomorrow. And that's just made me realize that what the most important part of AI is, it's that it's the human impact of it, not just the technicality part always.

No, we don't want to have like the Terminator. I don't know if you guys ever saw that movie. The Terminator? No, never saw that. No, watch the Terminator movie because that's when the machine intelligence takes over the world and causes a whole bunch of problems with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's okay. I make my kids— I've made my kids watch movies from like the '70s, '80s, you know, when I was younger. And you know, you guys should watch Terminator because that's one, probably one of the first movies that talked about AI and artificial Intelligence. So if people want to find more, find out more about your project, where do they go to find out?

Um, we have our website at, it's aliteracyproject.co. Yeah. Okay.

Who made the website?

Um, well, I made the website, but there's actually an AI tool that helps me with the design aspect because I can like code some stuff, but I can't really make it Okay, what did you use?

What kind of, what kind of AI software did you use? What, what AI software?

It's built into the website editor. It's built into the website editor. The website editor is called Lovable, and it has like an AI tool that can edit with you. And that's, it's really cool, actually.

Yeah, it's cool. You can just, it's amazing how AI and a lot of, you know, companies like Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, and others have AI tools so they can help you build a website. So any other final thoughts that you guys want to tell the audience?

No, not really. I think we covered most of it.

Yeah, I think we talked about a lot of things I wanted to cover.

Yeah, but like, honestly, I think most important thing for the audience to remember is to just, like, if you're educated about these tools, then you have so much power because you're not going to fall for the scams as easily. You're going to be able to leverage these tools to your advantage. That's definitely important.

And do you guys want, like, other, like, students to reach out to you guys? Maybe they want to start this project in their high school.

Oh yeah. If there's any students that are interested in this project, we would love that because we want to expand and start, like, different chapters. And we have a few.

No matter, no matter where you are in the country, we can make it work.

Or, like, in the world.

Yeah.

Okay. And they can find you guys on LinkedIn. We'll post your LinkedIn.

Oh, yeah. And our LinkedIn is also, yeah, linked on our website.

Or go to the website, right? Yeah. Message you guys. Because that would be really cool to have, like, chapters.

That would be cool.

All over of people learning about AI. Because I think it's super important. It's definitely affecting society. Like, I even talk about it on my podcast a lot, is in business, you know, you guys probably too young about newspapers and the Yellow Pages, but that would be the main place where you would find, you know, go to find a business or find whatever you're looking for. And then it became, okay, you go to Google, right? And now, you know, they're doing research and they're saying like more than 50% of people are searching for answers or questions they have. They're not going to Google or Yahoo or the search engine. They're going to ChatGPT, Perplexity.

Yeah.

And asking questions, you know. And do you find like your friend, when you ask like students and you say, well, where do you go to find information? Where, where did— where are they going? Is it like 50/50 or is it—

it's, it's, yeah, it's like 50/50. Or maybe, maybe there's a little bit more people going to AI now. Yeah, like a lot of people definitely do Google search, but also Google search also gives you stuff straight from Gemini too. So that's also AI.

I think a lot of people just read like the Gemini box and that just—

Yeah, people don't like scroll down.

Yeah. So it makes it difficult on businesses to advertise and let people know about their business because, you know, it's being— we're in this AI-dominated information world. You know, of everything for information. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on the podcast today, and you can— we'll post their, their website link in the, in the video, in the podcast notes, and we'll post also the link to their LinkedIn profiles and their website. And you can find out more about the AI Literacy Project and get educated. And I hope people in your area more students join your club and other schools start their own AI clubs, because I think it's super important that students get educated about AI at a younger age and learn more about computers. And I hope someone from your school listens to the podcast. They need to teach students how to use Microsoft tools and use Adobe and things like that, because At Jobs Today, I tell people, you know, if you're at a job— and you can mention this in your club when you talk to students— there, people are not going to lose their job because of AI. People are going to lose jobs because they don't know how to use AI. AI can help you do your job more efficiently, and people need to understand that part of the AI. And that's my final words on it. Do you guys have anything else you want to add?

No, I completely agree with what you just said. Yeah, it's, it's not like people get like fearmongered into thinking that AI is just stealing their jobs, but really it's just, it honestly like creates more jobs and it lets you do more important things with your time because it saves time on those like small tasks.

But yeah, I think if people like don't really know what AI is, what the positive aspects it has to offer. Just like taking the time to research, like to do your own research, not ask AI what AI is. I think doing that could be really helpful to see, um, how much potential it wields.

All right, so there it is. Now the view of AI from young people that are in society and what's going on with AI. Now thank you everybody for joining us on the podcast today. B2B Vault, the biz-to-biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. You can find more about Nationwide Payment Systems and the podcast on our website, nationwidepaymentsystems.com. Peace out, everybody, and carpe diem— seize the day— and don't be scared of AI.