Lab 4

CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of online sexual crimes

While I am concerned with the environmental impact of AI, what it means for how academics will be conducted, and how it is being used in humanistic work and art, my biggest ethical concern with AI, specifically AI-generated images, has not been mentioned in the three readings for this week or in class. My biggest ethical concern with AI image manipulation, which was touched on briefly in the article from The Conversation, is deepfake technology. Sonja Drimmer specifically mentioned it being used on the voices of politicians to use the technology and make it seem like they said something they haven’t. This mention was about audio and not image generation, but deepfake images can be made as well.

When AI gets attention for recovering lost works of art, it makes the technology sound a lot less scary than when it garners headlines for creating deep fakes that falsify politicians’ speech or for using facial recognition for authoritarian surveillance.

Sonja Drimmer

I was also thinking about the New Yorker article and what Ted Chiang wrote about what people do and don’t notice as being off.

Lossy compression is often used for photos, audio, and video in situations in which absolute accuracy isn’t essential. Most of the time, we don’t notice if a picture, song, or movie isn’t perfectly reproduced.

 Ted Chiang

Combining both the ability to create deepfake images and what was written above about how imperfections in pictures and video are often overlooked creates a big ethical concern of this technology being used to make exploitative material. This is not just a fear but something that has already happened on a large scale. What is being called the ‘new Nth Room’ included deepfakes of explicit material of victims. Teachers and students at multiple universities, high schools, and middle schools were targeted. I was reminded of this by the mention of the word ‘deepfake’ both in the article from The Conversation and in the presentation on Tuesday.