AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them.; The Washington Post, March 28, 2024

Nitasha Tiku

 and 

Pranshu Verma

, The Washington Post; AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them.

"Efforts to prevent this new kind of identity theft have been slow. Cash-strapped police departments are ill equipped to pay for pricey cybercrime investigations or train dedicated officers, experts said. No federal deepfake law exists, and while more than three dozen state legislatures are pushing ahead on AI bills, proposals governing deepfakes are largely limited to political ads and nonconsensual porn."

Panel of Distinguished AI Experts Discuss Challenges of AI Regulation with the Honorable Ro Khanna; Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, March 27, 2024

Ann Skeet, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University ; Panel of Distinguished AI Experts Discuss Challenges of AI Regulation with the Honorable Ro Khanna

"Leadership takes many forms, and often the most important thing leaders can do is listen. The Institute for Technology Ethics and Culture at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Santa Clara School of Law hosted a roundtable discussion on March 18, 2024, with Congressman Ro Khanna and leaders from industry, civil society, and academia. Congressman Khanna wanted to hear from experts in his district to inform his thinking about AI regulation. I was honored to moderate the discussion.

Opinions were as diverse as the group bringing them forward. It was observed that many of us are used to speaking so frequently with those in our own field that the chance to connect with those in other areas reveals sharp differences in perspective. Several participants felt, for example, that deepfakes are not something to be too concerned about since they are easily identifiable, whereas others felt there are still many people who struggle to identify them.  People are often confused by false images or voices and as technology advances, this confusion will only deepen."

A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China; Business Insider, March 25, 2024

Matthew Loh , Business Insider; A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China

AI ghosts are coming. But must we perform from beyond the grave?; The Washington Post, June 22, 2023

 Bina Venkataraman, The Washington Post; AI ghosts are coming. But must we perform from beyond the grave?

"At a minimum, consider putting your wishes regarding an AI avatar into your will. You might also exert some control by creating your own ghost in advance instead of leaving critical design choices to your descendants."

Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here; NPR, March 11, 2021

Emma Bowman, NPR; Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here

"In a crop of viral videos featuring Tom Cruise, it's not the actor's magic trick nor his joke-telling that's deceptive — but the fact that it's not actually Tom Cruise at all.

The videos, uploaded to TikTok in recent weeks by the account @deeptomcruise, have raised new fears over the proliferation of believable deepfakes — the nickname for media generated by artificial intelligence technology showing phony events that often seem realistic enough to dupe an audience.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR's All Things Considered that the Cruise videos demonstrate a step up in the technology's evolving sophistication."

California makes ‘deepfake’ videos illegal, but law may be hard to enforce; The Guardian, October 7, 2019

Kari Paul, The Guardian; California makes ‘deepfake’ videos illegal, but law may be hard to enforce 

AB 730 makes it illegal to circulate doctored videos, images or audio of politicians within 60 days of an election

"California made it illegal to create or distribute “deepfakes” in a move meant to protect voters from misinformation but may be difficult to enforce.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Thursday signed legislation that makes it illegal to create or distribute videos, images, or audio of politicians doctored to resemble real footage within 60 days of an election.

Deepfakes are videos manipulated by artificial intelligence to overlay images of celebrity faces on others’ bodies, and are meant to make viewers think they are real."

Inside the Deepfake ‘Arms Race’; The Daily Beast, October 7, 2019

David Axe, The Daily Beast; Inside the Deepfake ‘Arms Race’

Can countermeasures neutralize the coming wave of high-tech disinformation?

"The first deepfakes appeared in late 2017 on Reddit. An anonymous user calling themselves “deepfakes”—a portmanteau of artificial-intelligence “deep learning” and “fakes”—imposed celebrities’ faces on pornography...

A deepfake video, still image, or audio recording is the product of a clever bit of coding called a “generative adversarial network,” or GAN. A GAN has two components: a discriminator and a generator. The discriminator is trying to tell fake media from real media. The generator is trying to fool the discriminator with increasingly realistic-seeming fakes."

No, You Don’t Really Look Like That; The Atlantic, December 18, 2018

Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic; No, You Don’t Really Look Like That

"The stakes can be high: Artificial intelligence makes it easy to synthesize videos into new, fictitious ones often called “deepfakes.” “We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us,” wrote my colleague Franklin Foer. “Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.” Deepfakes are one way of melting reality; another is changing the simple phone photograph from a decent approximation of the reality we see with our eyes to something much different."

This is the scariest comics panel I’ve seen in ages; Polygon, November 9, 2018

Susana Polo, Polygon; This is the scariest comics panel I’ve seen in ages

"Tom Taylor’s X-Men Red is one of the best comics of 2018, and this week, in its penultimate issue, it delivered the most unsettling comic book moment I’ve read in a while...

[Spoilers for X-Men Red #10]

The Jean Grey video is a deepfake.

A lot of the technology we see in comic books is science fiction, or so cutting edge as to not be readily available, all to make our heroes seem like they’re cut out to do what normal people can’t. But videos that convincingly make a person look like they’ve done or said something they never did aren’t tomorrow’s technology.

Deepfaked video, and audio, is a reality that online spaces are scrambling to confront even now. The potential uses of deepfakes are spooky enough. What’s spookier is the connection that X-Men Red #10 makes in this scene.

There is a commonly available real-world technology that can do what comics books used to have to invent clones, evil twins and shapeshifters for.

Trinary points out that the video of Jean is not a perfect fake, and can be disproven. But the damage is already done.

“There will still be people who want this to be reality so much they will reject any proof,” Storm replies. “They want the worst. This supports their narrative. No amount of truth will sway them.”