Where: Tech Brew, ‘AI election roundup: Deepfakes and AI memes are taking off’
Who: Shomir Wilson, associate professor in the College of IST L
What: Wilson discussed how the threat AI poses to elections comes from the scale of misinformation it allows bad actors to produce. It can also be difficult to reliably detect AI’s fingerprints on text, he said, making it tough to measure the scope of the problem.
“Anyone can just write, but being able to write in large volumes, and to write using copy conventions to write well, basically — or some value of well — at a large scale, that’s pretty new, and that’s continuing to evolve,” Wilson told Tech Brew. “So, that enables folks who want to generate this information to generate large volumes of it at once. And sometimes quantity is useful for getting your message across.”
Despite the attention paid to AI’s role in this election, Wilson said “we’re not at the peak yet” in terms of how sophisticated this technology is likely to get in the future, especially once text-to-video generation evolves more.
“The big difficulty here is there is the cat-and-mouse game, and generation is always, I think, a little bit ahead of the detection,” Wilson said.