Facing a new threat: Deepfakes and its dangers
This possible threat is called Deepfakes and they are taking over the internet. Deepfakes can be defined as videos created using Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) algorithms on which they attach someones face to a video footage that already exists. This online trend can be traced back to November of 2017 by user R/Deepfakes on the Reddit community. The before mentioned user created a specific forum on which he started sharing explicit video with the faces of multiple celebrities. After nearly six months, he got banned from Reddit for violating the site’s Terms of Use.
On January of 2018 an application was announced with the sole purpose of face swapping. It was getting popular quickly, as many youtubers and redditors began to post funny memes featuring Nicholas Cage, and many other celebrities. This may seem like a funny application to this type of technology but imagine what would be the consequences if someone made a video of a world leader declaring war on another country… Scary right?
Deepfakes have been described as “were truth goes to die” by The Guardian Newspaper in the United Kingdom. The Congress of the United States is also aware of the possible consequences of this tech and today, they introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act. This is a bill drafted to protect its citizens from a harmful use any type of technology and from any type of software that by “utilizing automated information, pose a threat to the privacy or personal information”.
Even inventor Elon Musk has some concerns about Artificial Intelligence. “A.I. is not necessarily bad, but it is definitely going to be outside of human control. Is going to be really tempting to use A.I. as a weapon. In fact, it will be used as a weapon”. He goes on into saying that he even tried to convince people to slow down on the use of this type of intelligence.
Have you heard about this kind of modality? What do you think? let me know in the comments below.
