There has been a lot of talk about AI recently debating its opportunities and potential risks. Today AI can be trained on images and videos of real customers or executives, to produce audio and video clips impersonating them. These have the potential to fool security systems, and according to a report by identity verification platform Sumsub, the number of “deepfake” incidents in the financial technology sector alone increased by 700% in 2023, year on year.
This issue suddenly hit much closer to home for me when Pikesville High School, my alma mater, recently made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It seems that the school’s athletic director allegedly used AI to create and publish a fake recording of the principal’s voice making, let’s just say, inappropriate comments. This prompted immediate public outrage against the principal before these allegations came forward. However, the principal’s reputation is stained regardless of the outcome. This situation serves as a salutary warning that as a society we need to get a handle on AI before such instances become a daily occurrence.
