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Paris 2024 Olympics chief: “We are ready”
Eight months ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Tony Estanguet says Paris plans to offer “a fantastic moment of celebration.”
Estanguet serves as President of the Paris 2024 host committee and led the hard-fought battle to bring the Games back to the city for the first time in 100 years.
The three-time Olympic gold medalist, a canoeist, is one of the most decorated French athletes and the first to win gold in three different Olympiads. In 2022, he served as his nation’s flag-bearer at the Beijing Games.
“I lived (my) first life as an athlete and my life completely changed, thanks to the Olympics and sport,” Estanguet told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis.
On the sidelines of the recent Paris Peace Forum, Estanguet said Paris is ready to host an estimated 10 million spectators across 41 venues in and around the city. The city recently had a spate of bad publicity over bed bug infestation, a story Estanguet says is “ridiculous.” “People will criticize,” he said, but “we are ready to welcome the world.”
France is not, however, prepared to welcome the Russian flag. President Emmanuel Macron said in September that Russia has no place at the Games due to war crimes committed during its ongoing war in Ukraine. While the International Olympic Committee will ultimately decide, Macron wants Russian athletes to compete under the Russian Olympic Committee flag instead.
“Definitely there is impact on political side, but what is really important for me to protect and to preserve is the fact that the decisions are made from the sport movement,” Estanguet said.
The 2024 Summer Games begin on Friday, July 26.
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At the Paris Peace Forum, grassroots activists highlight urgent issues
Global gatherings like the UN General Assembly, Munich Security Conference, and the World Economic Forum have no shortage of power players engaged in very high-level discussion and debate about the state of the world. The Paris Peace Forum, which wrapped this weekend in the City of Lights, is no exception. The host country’s President Emmanuel Macron was on deck to chat about climate change with Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky joined via video to remind everyone at the Peace Forum that a war still rages 1200 miles away, and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern warned of the dangers of extremist content online.
But the gathering in Paris also put grassroots activists front and center, literally. As you entered the Palais Brongniart, the stunning 19th-century structure that has served as home to the PPF since its inception in 2018, the first sight was a sea of kiosks, each staffed by representatives from more than 50 organizations from around the world who are working at local levels to combat the most pressing problems of our time.
One Qatar-based organization funds projects that promote female leadership—from farms to small business ownership. Another group based in Helsinki is training people in Ukraine to process evidence and testimony of Russian war crimes. From climate change to responsible AI, many of the conversations in the foyer of the palace were as captivating as the ones happening on the main stage a flight below.
Each year, the PPF accepts applications for its “Space for Solutions,” giving physical space inside the venue for these organizations to network with some of the most influential players on the planet.
Aurélie Villaespesa, Projects Officer at the Paris Peace Forum, explained to GZERO’s Tony Maciulis that more than 4000 organizations applied this year. Roughly 50 of the very best were invited to join the forum and share their work, message, and mission.
PPF gave GZERO a chance to roam through the space and meet some of the grassroots gamechangers proving that solutions don’t just come from inside the palace—they often rise from the people.
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Paris Peace Forum Director General Justin Vaïsse: Finding common ground
How do you find peace in a world so riven by rivalries and competing interests? One step, according to Director General of the Paris Peace Forum Justin Vaïsse, is to challenge simplistic notions of East-West or North-South alignment.
“We're trying to get all the different actors, East, West, North, South, to work on the same issues and to make progress where they have common interests,” he said to GZERO’s Tony Maciulis on the sidelines of the 2023 Paris Peace Forum. “We focus on competition and geopolitical rivalry while we forget the iceberg coming our way when we fight on the deck of the Titanic.”
This year, the conversation centers on cyberspace and how to protect democracies in a world where rapidly advancing AI technology makes them ever more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. The bad news is that 2024 promises to be the worst year on record for election interference. The good news, on the other hand, is that many countries have their own interest in hammering out a workable system for regulating AI, and Vaisse expects a common language regulating cyberattacks to emerge in the coming months.
At the 2023 Paris Peace Forum, GZERO also hosted a Global Stage event, Live from the Paris Peace Forum: Embracing technology to protect democracy.
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How AI threatens elections
According to a new report from Ginny Badanes of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward Initiative, two billion people will have the opportunity to vote in national elections over the next 14 months. So many elections in multiple consequential countries promise authoritarians who want to degrade democracy are gearing up to launch cyberattacks to destabilize and spread doubt in the free world.
And artificial intelligence makes the threat more severe than ever before. “We are in a moment where a new technology is emerging — generative AI — and there are a lot of concerns about what that is going to mean, particularly for information operations.”
She spoke with Tony Maciulis at the 2023 Paris Peace Forum, where GZERO also hosted a Global Stage event, Live from the Paris Peace Forum: Embracing technology to protect democracy.
Stop AI disinformation with laws & lawyers: Ian Bremmer & Maria Ressa
How do you keep guardrails on AI? “In the United States, historically, we don't respond with censorship. We respond with lawyers,” said Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of the Eurasia Group & GZERO Media, speaking in a GZERO Global Stage discussion live from the 2023 Paris Peace Forum.
Setting up basic legal structures around artificial intelligence is the first step toward building an infrastructure of accountability that can keep the technology from doing at least as much harm as good.
The European Union has an early lead in setting up systems, but Rappler CEO Maria Ressa said, “the EU is winning the race of the turtles” as the entire globe lags far behind the pace of technological advancement. Without legal structures and a healthy free press and civic society in place, democracies will struggle to remain resilient to the threats of AI-generated disinformation.
The livestream was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
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AI, election integrity, and authoritarianism: Insights from Maria Ressa
There’s a big, big problem with using AI to defend democracy, says Rappler CEO Maria Ressa: “You need to feed it.”
“AI as a defense tool will always be behind the eight-ball because it is reactive," she said, requiring terabytes of data at a time to pick out the patterns that betray malicious actors. By the time they are detected, they can flood social media with lies that amplify ordinary citizens’ fear when they don’t know what to believe.
Ressa spoke in a GZERO Global Stage livestream discussion with Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group & GZERO Media, Eléonore Caroit, Vice-President of the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, moderated by Julien Pain, journalist and host of Franceinfo, live from the 2023 Paris Peace Forum.
Her newsroom, Rappler, is one of the last independent media outlets in the Philippines and operates under tremendous political pressure. The government has filed so many lawsuits against Ressa and Rappler that she could face a century of prison time. What’s more, Rappler’s reporting attracted repeated cyberattacks in 2021, trying to bring the website down. “When we were attacked, it took the platforms years to come back and fix it," said Ressa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work to safeguard freedom of expression as a journalist.
Watch the full livestream panel discussion: "Live from the Paris Peace Forum: Embracing technology to protect democracy"
The livestream was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
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Should AI content be protected as free speech?
Americans love free speech, and for all its flaws, the American government does take a lighter hand than many other major democracies. But even in the US, there are limits. So where does misinformation and fabricated imagery and audio generated by AI fit into free speech?
Eléonore Caroit, vice president of the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, says she understands the sensitivities around taking down political speech in the US. "In the US, you have the First Amendment, which is so important that anything else could be seen as censorship,” she said, “Whereas, in France, I think we have a higher tolerance to some sort of regulation, which is not going to be seen as censorship as it would in the US.”
Caroit spoke at a GZERO Global Stage discussion with Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group & GZERO Media, Rappler CEO Maria Ressa, and Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, moderated by Julien Pain, journalist and host of Franceinfo, live from the 2023 Paris Peace Forum.
Where should the line fall between free speech and censorship? If someone, say, publishes a campaign video made with AI that showed misleading images of immigrants rioting to call for hardcore migration policy, would the government be within its rights to force tech companies to remove it from their platforms? Caroit mentioned that in fact, France removed two videos from far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour made with AI, and could have struck down his entire YouTube channel if he published a third.
But to rein in out-of-control AI, which can generate mountains of text, audio, and video at the click of a mouse, countries of all persuasions on free speech — even those decidedly “anti” — will need to come to an agreement on basic rules of the road.
Watch the full livestream panel discussion: "Live from the Paris Peace Forum: Embracing technology to protect democracy"
The livestream was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
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How are emerging technologies helping to shape democracy?
How do you know that what you are seeing, hearing, and reading is real?
It’s not an abstract question: Artificial intelligence technology allows anyone with an internet connection and a half-decent laptop to fabricate entirely fictitious video, audio, and text and spread it around the world in the blink of an eye.
The media may be ephemeral, but the threat to governments, journalists, corporations, and you yourself is here to stay. That’s what Julien Pain, journalist and host of Franceinfo, tried to get at during the GZERO Global Stage discussion he moderated live from the 2023 Paris Peace Forum.
In response to a poll that showed 77% of the GZERO audience felt democracies are weakening, Eléonore Caroit, vice president of the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, pointed out that the more alarming part is many people around the globe are sufficiently frightened to trade away democratic liberties for the purported stability of unfree governments — a trend authoritarian regimes exploit using AI.
“Democracy is getting weaker, but what does that provoke in you?” she asked. “Do you feel protected in an undemocratic regime? Because that is what worries me, not just that democracy is getting weaker but that fewer people seem to care about it.”
Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, said a lot of that fear stems from an inability to know what to trust or even what is real as fabricated media pervades the internet. The very openness that democratic societies hold as the keystone of their civic structures exacerbates the problem.
“Authoritarian states can tell their citizens what to believe. People know what to believe, the space is made very clear, there are penalties for not believing those things,” Bremmer explained. “In democracies, you increasingly don’t know what to believe. What you believe has become tribalized and makes you insecure.”
Rappler CEO Maria Ressa, who is risking a century-long prison sentence to fight state suppression of the free press in the Philippines, called information chaos in democracies the “core” of the threat.
“Technology has taken over as the gatekeeper to the public sphere,” she said “They have abdicated responsibility when lies spread six times faster than the truth” on social media platforms.
Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith offered a poignant example from Canada, in which a pro-Ukraine activist was targeted by Russia with AI-generated audio of a completely fabricated statement. They spliced it into a real TV broadcast and spread the clip across social media to discredit the activist’s work of years within minutes.
The good news, Smith said, is that AI can also be used to help fight disinformation campaigns.
“AI is an extraordinarily powerful tool to identify patterns within data,” he said. “For example, after the fire in Lahaina, we detected the Chinese using an influence network of more than a hundred influencers — all saying the same thing at the same time in more than 30 different languages” to spread a conspiracy theory that the US government deliberately started the blaze.”
All the panelists agreed on one crucial next step: aligning all the stakeholders — many with competing interests and a paucity of mutual trust — to create basic rules of the road on AI and how to punish its misuse, which will help ordinary people rebuild trust and feel safer.
The livestream was part of the Global Stage series, produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft. These discussions convene heads of state, business leaders, technology experts from around the world for critical debate about the geopolitical and technology trends shaping our world.
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