The Dark Side of AI and Exponential Technologies
Can You Spot a “Deep Fake” Photo of Yourself?
One of the things I'd like to talk to you about is, in fact, the future being brought to us by exponential technologies, the latest innovations and advances, science and research that are bringing to us incredible innovations that are going to impact virtually every aspect of life on our planet.
But sometimes we've got the dark side of Expo Tech. And I want to share with you one worrisome item back in 2018. You may remember the story when it came out several years ago. NVIDIA, that company is one of the leading manufacturers of the latest computer chips, the greatest technologies that are being used in computers and artificial intelligence. NVIDIA back in 2018 created photos of people who don't exist. Fake photos. The A.I. is so sophisticated that it could create an image of a person out of thin air all by itself. Well, that was a little worrisome to a lot of folks. They were fearful that scammers would be able to use this technology to trick people.
For example, they could splice your real face onto a person who's performing in a porn movie and then blackmail you. That's just one example. So the question that has arisen ever since NVIDIA demonstrated the capability of this technology was the question can you spot a deepfake? That's what these things are called. A deepfake is when you see a photo or a video that was made by a computer, artificial intelligence, or a human. Was that a real video that somebody shot? Was it a real picture somebody took or was it invented on the computer, and it was totally falsified? Can you spot a deepfake? Do you know when what you're looking at is a fake?
Well, to find out if humans are able to do this, researchers used NVIDIA's technology and they generated 400 deepfake photos. Half of these photos were men. Half of them were female. They were split equally among Blacks, Caucasians, East Asians, and Southern Asians. And they then asked over 300 people to take a test. Each person judged 128 of those faces, and they were asked to say is the photo a real person or is it fake?
The folks who took the test were wrong 52% of the time. In other words, that's worse than if they had just randomly guessed. This is a little scary and in fact, it gets even scarier. The researchers then ask the people to decide if the person in the photo was trustworthy. And they rated the fake photos 8% more trustworthy than the real people.
This is worrisome. According to this research, you're not able to identify whether what you're looking at is fake or real, and you're more likely to trust the fake than the real. What might we get suckered into because of this? It's one illustration of how the technology is changing so rapidly as humans are struggling to keep up. And that means more than ever, we need to be on our guard. It's the dark side of exponential technologies and we need to be aware.