Another Appalling Downside to AI

As megacorporations pour historic sums of money into advancing AI as rapidly as possible, warnings of unintended consequences of the new tech continue to be brushed aside. This morning, Axios reported on another: AI-generated child pornography based on publicly available photos from social media:

A wave of fake but socially destructive images is overwhelming parents, schools and law enforcement across the country.

This week, a Virginia man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for copying photos of kids he knew and using an AI tool to create pornographic images. … Similar incidents have popped up everywhere from Iowa to suburban Philadelphia and Long Island.

Earlier this year, a Kentucky teen died by suicide after being blackmailed with AI-generated images, according to ABC News.

Axios cited a survey showing that 1 in 10 teens said they personally knew someone who had deepfake nude imagery created of them. Oftentimes, the perpetrator is a classmate.

AI’s capabilities are advancing far quicker than regulators can possibly keep up with. In the absence of morality and self-governance, technology is handing extraordinarily powerful tools to unrestrained, malicious actors, with disastrous effects too numerous to count:

• AI use has utterly upended education; students are widely relying on it to write their papers, solve their math problems, and do their thinking for them.
• Interaction with AI chatbots or virtual assistants is replacing meaningful human connections, including “romantic relationships.”
• Obsessive AI use has created delusional behavior that has cost people jobs, marriages and relationships, and sent some people to jail.
• Amoral AI chatbots have given people ruinous advice, encouraging eating disorders, disastrous financial decisions, paranoia, violence against others, even suicide.

It is impossible to foresee just how revolutionary and far-reaching the effects will be of society embracing this potent, anarchistic technology. As God said at the tower of Babel, “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”—even the most heinous evils. Don’t expect companies whose god is mammon or governments greedy for power to exercise any restraint—no matter the cost to real people.