Before I write anything else, I promised an update on the email I sent to the company that decided to make Remembrance Day a one-day sale kind of day. They replied, and they did it in a thoughtful way. It was not meant as dismissive of the somber occasion, but they understood why it came across in that way. They’ll do better from here on. So, hats off, because you know, the response came in less than three hours. Hope in humanity was revived for a bit.
Just in time for the next nosedive.
As they say, it’s one day at a time and that might become the most sustainable modus operandi for those who think a bit too much about the world around. When it comes to AI news, it’s a can of worms like no other. A recent piece that I found troubling, especially as a parent, contained a troubling story. The topic: people can use AI tools (and there are many facilitators out there!) to create deep fakes of images and videos to be posted online or used to blackmail people. It can be political deepfake material, which impacts individuals and society at large (a topic for another day), and then there’s deepfake porn, images and videos, which was what the story I came across talked about. It can happen to anyone whose photos are posted on social media, from children to adults. It was bad enough before AI got tangled in it, but now it has been grown to beyond gargantuan proportions.
But it’s a way to connect with people… social media, I mean, isn’t it? The price for all that, though? Huge. It increases by the day too which is why some may decide it’s not worth paying. There is valuable and accurate content in there though covered in layers of information that may or may not be accurate, which then you must do the work of checking. Almost a full-time job, some would say. Social media is a way to communicate with like-minded people, for that feeling of belonging to ‘the tribe’, which is so uniquely human. And maybe there is still a way to do it safely, or better, but I don’t see it happening yet.
But. People display their personal photos, their own, and their children’s, by the billions. There are lots of articles online about the most influential child influencers and there are resources on how-to build your child’s influencer career or how a brand can collaborate with established kid influencers. I mean, no one in their right mind should consider that, because children’s innocence should be for sale, but many do. A new level of being unhinged, in my opinion.
Then again, school-aged children and teenagers do it themselves and often times the photos they post are suggestive. Except that with the AI sites that create these images and videos, you need nothing but a regular photo/video.
Darkness attached to all this reads like a nightmare. I know of a few young people who got sextorted in the last couple of years. They received playful private messages over social media and found themselves blackmailed a few hours later. Sadly, some of these stories can end up with young people feeling there is no other way out than taking their own lives. Many did.
Let’s not forget an essential and atrocious thing: the internet world is teeming with some very dark and twisted characters. Adults preying on children is not news but again, same terrible problem: it gets darker by the day and there are more places to hide and spy from.
This is but one reason why Australia, for example, proposed banning the social media presence of children under 16. It’s high time more countries do it.
As for young people doing it to other people… Bullying was once happening in the schoolyard, and it was bad. But the bully had a face. Then bullying moved into the online world and it became worse. We’re now witnessing the next level unfolding: AI tools can be employed to unravel people’s lives in more awful ways.
My sons are past the ages when they are most vulnerable, and we’ve been talking about posting content and being aware of predators for a long time. But it’s troubling to see these phenomena and impossible not to bring it up. And as always, someone will ask, ‘So what’s the solution?’.
The only one I can think of is ‘don’t post photos of your kids or yourself online and talk to your children about their online activity’. Yes, it is a luddite approach but at this point it may just be the only way we know of that can ensure our children’s safety.
And a note on AI: it can be an amazing tool that can improve our lives tremendously but based on the opinions of those who created it, there are troublesome aspects we have to consider. The emphasis is on using it as a tool, rather than creating a landscape without proper boundaries to contain it. That’s for another day though.