Deepfakes: A “Don’t Look Up!” Moment
My neighbor is an 80-year-old who worked for 35 years at IBM in DC and moved south to live with his boyfriend at the height of the pandemic. Besides his concerns about his AFib and the cost of Xarelto, which is $1800 for 3 months, he is concerned about deepfakes and the s**cides that have happened because someone created a nude deepfake.
Last night at a dinner at Rusty Pelican, under an intense Miami shower, Karhlton Moore and his colleague from the DOJ mentioned a case where a school teacher was accused of s*xual harassment of kids because of a voice that was later proven in court to be a deepfake. How much stress did that poor teacher go through, and what would have happened if the innocence couldn’t be proven?
Alejandro Dabdoub told me about cases in Mexico where coyotes send deepfake videos of people supposedly killed or murdered on the way to this land and ask for payment. ✅Roland Kissoon MBA, CCSK, CRISC told me about deepfakes in financial crime, cases in the Caribbean where videos of an influential archbishop are being used to ask for money. There are tons of cases from all around the world, and it’s only getting worse.
A couple of years ago, we stood up against Amazon’s plan to release voice cloning in Alexa, it got momentum and they listened (YouTube: https://lnkd.in/emr6uSca). I see our policymakers don’t know what to do. This is more of a long-term threat to them, while many of us think it’s an urgent threat.
In January, Miami AI Club published the first community-driven proposal for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), available here: [https://lnkd.in/eRYE8T2v].
Miami AI Club is launching a comprehensive research project on the societal impact of deepfakes globally with MAIC’s global experts in the deepfakes space. The outcome of this will be shared with global business and political leaders. This report will be publicly available at the AI & Deepfake event in September.
We need to act fast on this. We don’t have any reliable solutions to practically stop this. The wave is coming; don’t look up!