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What Pope Francis tells us in Balenciaga about artificial intelligence, fake news and deepfakes

1 year ago babelfish

What Pope Francis tells us in Balenciaga about artificial intelligence, fake news and deepfakes

Viral photos of Pope Francis in a flashy white puffer jacket or those of the arrest of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are just a few recent examples of the revolution triggered by AI, but where will it take us? Facts and comments

True or false? This is the dilemma that artificial intelligence poses to us. Social media then does the rest.

Viral photos of Pope Francis with Balenciaga's flashy white puffer or arrested Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin present us with something so believable that it seems real, but it's only the deception of artificial intelligence, which can make some smile and worry others a lot.

In fact, if the image of the Pope becomes a meme and does not cause major economic or social consequences, what happens if the subject of the moment is a head of state or the CEO of an important company?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITHIN EVERYONE'S REACH

In the amount of news and images that circulate online, especially through social networks that make them viral in a matter of seconds, it has been difficult for some time to distinguish between true and false, but the advent of artificial intelligence in everyone's hands makes the situation even more complex.

“Social media have given legions of imbeciles the right to speak,” Umberto Eco said, certainly not to criticize freedom of speech but to affirm that anyone can now reach and influence a vast audience. Let's think of the role social media played in the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 or of all the episodes of violence shown and then emulated by users.

You no longer need to be a creative expert, photographer or graphic designer to use software such as ChatGpt, Dawn AI, Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney (used to make photos of the Pope and which claims to be "a small self-financed team ”, with only 11 full-time staff members). If the images of Trump's arrest were taken by Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, those of the Pope are the work of a common user.

As Andrew Owens, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan told The Wall Street Journal : “Any Internet troll, with a few keystrokes and a click, can create compelling images that could fool a human ”.

RISK OF DISINFORMATION

In addition to fake news, according to experts, the time has come to know how to recognize deepfakes, i.e. "photos, videos and audio created thanks to artificial intelligence software which, starting from real content (images and audio), manage to modify or recreate, in an extremely realistic way, the characteristics and movements of a face or a body and to faithfully imitate a given voice”, explains the Privacy Guarantor , who recently banned ChatGpt in Italy , an emblem of this change.

Not an easy undertaking since even for AI and social media experts it is becoming, according to them , increasingly difficult to understand if an image is created through generative artificial intelligence and the risk is that disinformation can always be fed by more.

“I thought it was excellent. Everything fit well, there were no obvious distortions,” Jeff Hancock, professor of communications at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, told the WSJ about the pontiff's image.

WILL WE BE ABLE TO KEEP UP WITH THE SPEED OF AI?

Furthermore, while there are still traces of the AI's imperfection and limitations – for example, the hands in non-original photos are usually strange, disfigured or with more or fewer fingers – one cannot ignore the rapid progress it is making the sector and, therefore, these too will become gradually more convincing.

“With the powerful capabilities of the computer, we can make images do pretty much anything we want, twist them in specific ways, add specific items of clothing like the Pope's duvet,” said Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at the 'Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

The videos are currently less convincing but, according to experts, progress in this field could also occur faster than expected.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RISKS

Without wanting to become paranoid or boycott development and innovation, however, there are also greater risks that cannot be ignored. Lightman said he was concerned "about the ability of AI-generated imagery to manipulate the economy" and, citing the example of a fake image of a CEO doing something suspicious, speculated that this "could make plummet the value of a security and potentially damage an entire financial sector”.

And as the Brookings Institution recalls, “a suspected deepfake may already have played a role in the failed 2019 coup in Gabon and also in an attempt to discredit the Malaysian economy minister to force his resignation”.

"The debates over the authenticity of celebrity photos are just the tip of the iceberg," Baobao Zhang, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, told WSJ , referring to images seen recently on Reddit in which some users use artificial intelligence to generate false versions of real historical events.

“I fear there will come to a point where there will be so much false and highly realistic content online that most people will follow their tribal instincts as a guide to what they think is real, rather than actually informed opinions based on verified evidence” , said Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert who works as a consultant to companies and government agencies, including the Meta Reality Labs European Advisory Council.

The only treatments to stem this raging river therefore seem to be regulation, education and good information because, as Eco always said, "schools should teach how to filter the weird information on the Internet" and "newspapers should verify and unmask them daily ”.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/cosa-ci-dice-papa-francesco-in-balenciaga-su-intelligenza-artificiale-fake-news-e-deepfake/ on Tue, 04 Apr 2023 09:57:26 +0000.