Today the Associated Press (AP) has a disturbing story about the danger artificial intelligence (AI) poses for our next national election. Concerned voters need to read it and be aware of what could be coming.
No, correct that. Be aware of what is coming, of what has already come. Deep fake photos of candidates or the president doing things they didn’t actually do, saying things they didn’t actually say. Political ads with deep fake images of events that didn’t happen. Use your imagination. Because it’s a cinch others will. And to your detriment.
The next election could be awash in AI-generated images, voices, claims, accusations, events, and news. The potential is certainly there. And you know it will be exploited.
The AP story is titled “AI presents political peril for 2024 with threat to mislead voters.” You owe it to yourself to read it.
Forewarned is forearmed.
It’s very scary. Now we’ll have at least 10 or 100 different versions of the “truth.” And with newspapers disappearing across the country, who or what do we rely on ?
I had the same thoughts. But the reputable newspapers aren’t gone, they’ve just gone online. Most of them subscribe to AP or Reuters news services. AP, Reuters, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, and the New York Times generally make the top 10 in lists of most reputable, unbiased news sources.
Your list of most reputable, unbiased news sources is a good one, but a substantial part of the population would not agree. Probably the most destructive thing Trump did to our democracy was to undermine confidence in them. He has the cunning of the likes of Joseph Goebbels.
I checked several different sources and those were the names that came up consistently. Plus a couple more but I was too lazy to type them all out. They top my personal list too, unless I’m looking for local news.
The Internet needs protection. Only the gods know how this is to be done. We need a masked man on a white horse to come out of the west (?) and Fix Things so that lies and calumnies can be seen clearly for what they are. Or maybe King Arthur.
The sad fact is that we must depend on our government to make the laws, establish the guardrails for AI, and our politicians have amply demonstrated their lack of understanding of the electronic frontier. I’ll never forget Alaska’s Ted Stevens saying the internet is “a series of tubes.” At least if we put the younger generation in office, they’d understand.
The AP story did mention putting in place a special watermark to be used to identify AI-generated material … but of course only honest sources would use it.
Some time ago I realized the potential for bad actors creating seemingly real images and sounds that could easily result in innocent people losing lawsuits and even being incarcerated. I’m afraid trying to control AI is going to be like prohibition… Hard to recognize in time to stop the effect created. Scary when you can’t trust anything.
I’m questioning the wisdom of those who created and released these AI apps before suggesting someone should make rules/laws controlling them. As I’ve noted before, the horse is now out of the barn. It might well be too late to rein it in. Scary indeed. Too many bad actors in the world already. Now we give them this?