Is everything as it seems? AI’s rise requires new perspective, caution

Once upon a time, if you watched a video of me robbing the local bank you could be fairly certain that I lost my mind and chose a life of crime. Frankly, that is no longer the case. Technology has reached a point when making such a fake video is actually possible. Granted, it is harder than faking a photograph or generating a fictitious phone call using my real voice, but all of it is possible. You can do some of it with off-the-shelf software.

Behind much of this capability is the science of artificial intelligence, AI for short. A relatively significant amount of media attention has recently focused on this emerging technology. More than a few experts fear its potential. AI is best understood in the following simple context. Heretofore, computers only did what we programmed them to do. AI allows computers to program themselves. This equates to computers learning on their own. This technology has many legitimate uses. I will give you a local example. Our network monitoring systems traditionally observed data traffic and told us if anything occurred outside the parameters we set. Now, we are in the process of letting our systems learn what our networks look like when they are normal. They can then tell us when anything abnormal occurs. That is very useful.

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Unfortunately, in the hands of bad people, this technology can be seriously misused. AI enables fraudsters to do quickly what used to takes days, if not months. This unscrupulous activity could be something as simple as building a profile of you that will let them guess the answers to the secret questions in your banking app. It could be as sophisticated as threatening to post scandalous pictures or recordings of your voice on social media unless you pay them money. Social media is already awash with these “deep fakes.” One of the more insidious plots featured in recent media reports involved cloning the voice of a family member supposedly in distress. The voice samples were apparently mined from online videos.

The question for society is this: How do we behave in an era when we cannot reliably trust what we see and hear, especially online and from social media? To be certain, there is no easy answer. May I suggest that it begins with an understanding of our present reality. Bad people will do bad things with otherwise useful technology. This we must understand and react to responsibly when it occurs. Common sense will go a long way. If what you see does not feel or sound right, there is a good chance it is not. Make sure you thoroughly vet the source before reaching a conclusion. If you or someone you care about is threatened, remember that your best, perhaps only, means of survival is to immediately notify your local police department. They will know when to call in the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. To protect your family from fake communications, set up a secret code you can use to verify the identity of family members if something is a bit off. Add a distress code for use in the event someone is under duress. Little things like this go a long way toward keeping us safe in a crisis.

Finally, our news media and journalists must be hypervigilant in an era when fake information is easier to produce than the real thing. They must scrupulously assure that all they report is indeed accurate. Truth must always be their goal. Otherwise they run the risk of playing into the hands of those who would seek to do us harm. It is a high calling and one to which they simply must rise.

We know this is a heavy subject, but it is one about which we feel strongly. We are looking out for your well-being.

On Pages 8-9 are some reminders of things you can do to help protect yourselves.

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