Vikas Agarwal, an expert in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cloud Computing, writes a special column for Deccan Mirror about how AI can be a double-edged sword.
The recent case of Scarlett Johansson complaining about deepfake videos and few heroines from India has caught the eye of the public. The recent suicide of an Indian woman because of blackmailing her using her fake adult videos raises questions about how dangerous the AI can become when it falls into the wrong hands.
Common cases like impersonation, romance scams, deepfake scams, phishing emails, and banking fraud are slowly increasing day by day, which will be a serious threat against the advancement and support of research in artificial intelligence. Though the AI has been a tool that was supposed to be the friend of humanity to increase the transparency and efficiency, the contrary is becoming a reality that is gaining the unnecessary backlash.
With every new technology comes a package of its own limitations and new challenges. The same thing applies to AI, which has also become a double-edged sword, giving rise to sophisticated scams that are harder to detect and prevent. The fraudsters can generate fakes of everything just within a click of a button, a factor that’s more scary to hear. In such a case, the need for the emergence of combating tools against AI scams is now the need of the hour.
Just like fighting fire with fire, advanced detection tools will help to pick up and differentiate the real outputs from the AI-generated fake information. Public awareness campaigns are one more tool to create awareness among people about the kind of scams that are happening from AI-generated data. Just like the European Union has brought the world’s first regulations through an act, the world governments need to wake up and set up their own set of norms and regulations to control the birth of a new kind of false data generator.
Vigilance towards the happenings in the AI world can keep a check on what’s cooking up in the digital town, and so the controls can be imposed before it goes out of hand. The artificial intelligence, for sure, has to undergo a scanner of government regulations, which anyhow is the need of the hour.
