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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Even if one doesn’t count shenanigans related to the Trump campaigns, artificial intelligence (A.I.) has been a boon to a nefarious underworld, offering more and easier ways of manipulating political outcomes as well as illegally making and hiding money.
Elections over the past decade have exposed the danger to democracy of A.I.’s ability to create misinformation and outright lies augmented by their increasingly broad dissemination on unregulated social media platforms.
With so much power over our elected officials already, those of our oligarchs with A.I.-access have even greater abilities to prepare and present data to decision-makers not-so-gently rigged to their own advantage.
Fallacious proofs that neither fracking wastewater nor tobacco causes cancer, that lead paint doesn’t contribute to impaired cognitive development in kids, that pesticides and genetically modified crops aren’t impacting ecological systems, that the planet isn’t warming, that fentanyl doesn’t kill…
In September a North Carolina man was charged with fraud for scamming over $10 million in royalty payments by generating hundreds of thousands of fictitious songs with A.I., then using “bots” to surge their streaming on digital platforms billions of times for faked listeners.
Taylor Swift, a victim of A.I.-generated sexually explicit deepfakes going viral over 4chan and X as well as being falsely portrayed as supporting Trump, has spoken out about how destructive A.I. can be in the wrong hands. Far too few protections exist to prevent such happenings.
From the New York Times article: “A.I. Isn’t Magic” published after some of my previous A.I. articles:
“Tech’s hype machine moves faster than anyone can actually build the tech. The technologists are not waiting for it to catch up to its promises — they’re already on to the next thing.”
And techy-type criminals see this as an excellent opportunity for manipulating innocent Americans on the web.
Every A.I.-assisted computing solution that benefits society also helps in the development of creative and often virtually foolproof identity theft opportunities.
Felonious digital prospects abound wherever one looks. Short-term greed forever superseding long-term needs.
And that is the crux of the issue.
A.I. is not inherently dangerous; it is the lack of adequate oversight and controls for the uses to which it is put.
In addition to the damages A.I. imparts through political machinations and criminal activities, it poses a clear and present danger to us humans.
More and more, doctors are relying on A.I. to communicate with their patients on what are perceived to be basic concerns. But what if they are not? Is inanimate A.I. authorized to practice medicine without a license?
Such software-generated replies could have devastating consequences. What insurance covers these kinds of abuses?
Not criminal in common sense of the word, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, is seducing the United Arab Emirates, Asian chipmakers and U.S. officials to further bloat computing capabilities to augment A.I. with glittery lures of swamps of ducats.
So often, all that glitters is not gold: such an expansion will create an energy-suck that will overwhelm recent feeble attempts to curb global warming, resuscitating the fossil fuel-tentacled monsters from the bitumen ooze.
And how many of us have fought the frustrations of voice-recognition systems when trying to get help by phone? Now major corporations are instituting voice-recognition as another security protocol.
But what about those whose voices for some reason – whether an accent, the timber of someone’s voice, or simply that the computer is having a bad-CPU day – are not recognized? They can’t access their own money, can’t pay their bills, can’t get any help in this digital-dominated world.
So-called ‘agentic A.I.’ is on the rise. Agentic i.e. agency – a term that is all about people-controlled producing – has now been co-opted by a technology that operates with minimal human oversight.
Zoe Weinberg who has served on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recently launched ex/ante, a venture fund backing “companies tackling challenges like privacy, data ownership, security, identity, and information integrity” in the battle to ensure technology advances individual rights and human agency.
Just one small voice in a worldwide arena where governments with massive resources should be rushing into to provide holistic protections for mankind instead of subsidizing the egregiously cancerous expansion of A.I. for selfish military and economic advantages.
Before the human race takes a Terminator-tumble down the hellhole of manipulated and misused computer science, pressure must be brought on leadership, local and global, to set enforceable parameters on A.I. including a rigorous approval process before anyone, especially government entities and foreign agencies, are allowed access even for beta testing.
It may be a harder lift but is even more urgent with the incoming regime and its notoriously greedy and fickle frontmen.
P.S. I ran Microsoft Word’s A.I.-assisted Spelling and Grammar check on a recent article and it wanted me to replace ‘pushing the government to decimate unions’ to having the government decline unions, and ‘Further machinations helped concentrate whole sectors of industry under fewer and more powerful companies…’ turned out as ‘machines helping concentrate’ – just a tad too prophetic for my liking. Hopefully for you as well.
For people wishing to take a much deeper dive into the issue and paths to solutions already being addressed in D.C.
Those wanting a broader overview of internet and technology issues can learn more in two very accessible books: Dignity in the Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us and Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us. Both are by Ro Khanna, Representative from California’s Fremont District (which encompasses Silicon Valley), author of the Internet Bill of Rights developed in the wake of abuses and breaches during the 2016 election, and dark horse candidate for President in 2028.
Learn more about the A.I. industry’s over-reaction to the common-sense approaches contained in California’s SB-1047.
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
