photo credits Instagram: @thebusinessmagnets
I'm sure by now you can attest to the benefit of using Artificial Intelligence to help you out with everyday tasks, especially when it comes to word processing and the computation of ideas, workflow, photo editing and to the development of instructional learning etc. Artificial Intelligence is starting to make its way more and more into the mainstream every day and more and more organizations are also relying on AI to help them in the day-to-day operations of their organizations. But just as there’s always a positive there is also a negative. It is my position that at some point AI can and will be weaponized to cause public discourse. An example of what I'm talking about is when one of the first public cases of deep fakes started on social media around 2016-2017.
photo credits Instagram: @thebusinessmagnets
These deep fakes, which can really be perceived as either being use for disinformation or misinformation campaigns make great use of social media platforms such as Facebook (now Meta), Instagram and even YouTube and more to influence the hearts and minds of people across the globe. Through empirical observation, we were all able to see the public discord these deep fakes had on the social community both online and in real life. Fast forward today, I as well as millions of people are able to see how AI may be utilized politically to invoke emotions which are already high regard former US president Donald Trump.
photo credits Instagram: @thebusinessmagnets
On first glance, the images appeared to be real, but it isn’t until you took a closer look, that’s when you'd be able to spot the subtle differences which separates fiction from reality. This is very problematic because the average person has about a 3 second attention span on social media and thus will share images based upon their initial emotions. Question: what happens when one gets so triggered by an image that they instinctively share and misappropriate captions and comments based off of what initially triggered them? This notion becomes enhanced when that same person carries their triggered emotions with violence of any kind.
photo credits Instagram: @thebusinessmagnets
When that happens, we have to take into account what is known as the Turing Test. The Turing Test named after Alen Turing who according to the British Library was “a English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist.” In 1950, what we now call the Turing Test was originally called the “imitation game”. In a nutshell the Turing Test states that if a man cannot tell the difference between something that is artificial and real, then what is considered to be artificial must be real to the man. That's where we are today. As Artificial Intelligence progresses at the rate that it does there will be a point where it becomes absolutely believable, normalized and thus becomes real.
Consider this food for thought. More on the topic of Artificial Intelligence later.
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