When we came across a bright yellow daisy-like plant on a walk along the Magalloway River Trail with our dog, Lemon Magnolia, we were unable to identify it. The flowers were astonishingly bright, and unlike anything we had seen up to that point. It was not until we downloaded an app that the developer claims can identify more than a million plants with 98 percent accuracy that we learned it was Coltsfoot.
Software applications, or apps, are getting more and more sophisticated as artificial intelligence is put to new uses and “learns” as it is applied to the various tasks devised for it. For these we are grateful, and we can use the time we would have spent poring over encyclopedias and almanacs to find the name of the plant for more productive pursuits. Still, we embrace the new technology with some reservations.
AI is just as capable of misleading users as it is providing accurate information. Depending upon the prompts used to define the task at hand, AI can create totally false narratives that are difficult to detect. Just as it has proven capable of writing essays, creating art, and developing scripts that are almost indistinguishable from works created by humans, AI poses the threat of further blurring the line between truth and lies.
A large percentage of Americans have fallen victim to lies from a former United States president — so much so that a comeback that once seemed impossible for such a disreputable man is now a real possibility. Imagine what can happen if Donald Trump’s “truths” are further expanded through the use of artificial intelligence. Then imagine that every political candidate considers embracing AI to spread fictions that go beyond what The Donald and Representative George Santos have done.
Santos has pleaded not guilty to 13 federal crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and lying to the U.S. House of Representatives, after fabricating most of his campaign biography. His claims about working for Goldman Sachs, having Jewish ancestry, and running pet charities were largely untrue, but Santos says he merely embellished his resume.
Trump has manipulated video of Anderson Cooper’s reaction to the CNN “town hall” with the ex-president in New Hampshire to make it appear that Cooper was criticizing President Joe Biden instead.
Anderson had acknowledged the outrage that many expressed, “that someone who attempted to destroy our democracy was invited to sit on the stage in front of a crowd of Republican voters to answer questions and predictably continued to spew lie after lie after lie,” saying, “I get it. It was disturbing.” He went on to say that, “If lies are allowed to go unchecked, as imperfect as our ability to check them is on a stage in real time, those lies continue and those lies spread.”
Trump’s doctored video, which he posted to Truth Social on May 13, begins with Cooper’s monologue, then shifts to a town hall that Cooper held with Biden in October 2021.
Artificial intelligence can make it easier to create false biographies and manufactured videos. It can create truly fake news that can proliferate across social media. It may become impossible to separate truth from lies in what we see and read.
Thomas Aneiro, an expert in cybersecurity, envisions AI being used to enhance the work of people such as himself. In an article in Venture Beat, Aneiro discusses the potential use of AI to automate tasks that detect malware and keep computer systems safe. It might issue an alert for a brute force directory attack, manage privileged access accounts, and improve security in other ways.
“Unfortunately,” he writes, “we cannot program an AI tool to function like a human being; we can only use it for support, to analyze data and produce output based on facts that we input. While AI has made great leaps in a short amount of time, it can still produce false positives that need to be identified by a human being.”
That last fact, while limiting, also is a positive for AI. One of the fears about the use of artificial intelligence is that it will eliminate jobs for humans. Most people agree that AI can only handle tasks that will free people up to do more complex work — now. That does not assuage those who take a longer look at the potential capabilities of future versions of AI, when the computing can overtake human thought and might eliminate us as easily as we might step on an ant.
The truth is that no one knows where this is heading, and that is a matter of concern.
I try to push those thoughts aside as I make use of apps that identify plants, translate audio recordings into transcripts, and randomly choose songs from my collection to play while I’m driving with GPS laying out the route for me to travel.
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