By Ken Lass
I am seated at a table in a large meeting room at the First Baptist Church Trussville. The room is packed. Lots of gray hair and bald heads. We are all senior citizens who have come to a seminar on artificial intelligence, commonly referred to by its initials AI. Younger folks don’t need to attend events such as this, because they’ve grown up with this mysterious technology and seem to understand it, or at least, they’re not afraid of it.
But we are. We of the baby boom generation. The ones who grew up with mechanical typewriters, telephones fastened to a wall jack, handwritten letters. We’re afraid of it mostly because we find ourselves engulfed by internet scam artists, and also probably because we’ve watched too many old sci-fi movies. Like the 1970 flick “Colossus: The Forbin Project”. That’s the one where the United States turns its nuclear missile defense system over to a supercomputer. Unbeknownst to them, the Russian Soviet Union has done the same. The two supercomputers discover each other and combine forces to take over the world. It was just fun entertainment to watch fifty years ago. Now it seems eerily plausible.
As the seminar begins, we are told to relax. The concept of a super brain such as the fictional Colossus is the product of a skilled novelist, not a reality. The man at the podium is Clint Bircheat. He is head of cybersecurity for a company called Naphcare, which deals in correctional healthcare services. He reassures us by telling us what AI is not. It is not all-knowing. It is not capable of having its own agenda. It does not have human consciousness. It is not perfect. It frequently makes mistakes. It only knows and can use what has been fed into it.
What AI is very good at is organizing what it has been given, and producing a product based on the patterns it has observed. Clint illustrates this by presenting a video of First Baptist pastor Buddy Champion, demonstrating that he can make the good pastor appear to say anything Clint wants him to. He does this by feeding the image of the pastor from the church website into his AI software, along with a short segment from a recent sermon. Having been fed the likeness and the voice, AI can duplicate both and create a false video.
As we watch the fabricated creation, the room is a bit stunned, not sure whether to giggle or shiver. While the technology cannot have any malevolent intention of its own, clearly these capabilities in the hands of evil and dishonest people pose a true danger and threat. How are we to know what we see on social media platforms is real or phony?
Well, Clint reminds us again that AI is not perfect. The replications usually have flaws. For example, faces and skin are unnaturally smooth and without wrinkle or blemish. Parts of the image, such as hands and arms, may be distorted or out of focus. Often the speech will contain mispronounced words. The subject may say things the real person would never say, or speak with a strange accent. Movements can look cartoonish and backdrops flat and two dimensional. The signs are there if you look for them. But if you’re not examining carefully, it’s easy to be fooled.
Any time a video person asks for personal information or makes a sales pitch, your red flag should go up. We are told common sense is often the best tool. Ask yourself, would this person actually say this? If it sounds fishy, it probably is. We are advised to change our passwords to long, disorganized sequences of letters, numbers and symbols. Establish code words with your family members. Something you can ask them to say on a phone call to prove they are not robotic.
Yet we are reassured you need not dwell on the dark side. In many ways, AI is enhancing the quality of human life in manners we boomers could never have dreamed. It is helping to early diagnose diseases and recommend treatment. Seated at one of the front tables is a woman who is blind. She is wearing glasses that see what is in front of her and tell her what she is approaching or observing. Another Trussville woman tells me her family is considering having a swimming pool installed in their backyard, but the yard is irregularly shaped, long and narrow. She feeds a photo of the backyard into AI, along with a description of her dream pool, and it renders a beautiful photo of what it could look like. A photo they can hand to a contractor and say “Build me this”. AI can create music and art. Clint reveals to the audience he has fed the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”) into the system, and instructed it to create a song based on the famous passage. It responds with a catchy tune, complete with artificial singers and instrumentation.
I leave the seminar with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it occurs to me the Trussville Tribune could feed my previous columns into an AI application, and instruct it to write new material in my style, thereby making me expendable. You will know this has happened if these columns suddenly get much better written and organized. On the other hand, I return home assured that the technology cannot devise it’s own purpose, and that I can master it, and use it for my own convenience. Yep, I’m in control. My mind at ease, I plop down into my recliner, grab the remote, and turn on the TV to relax a bit before dinner. I don’t have to do any channel surfing.
The TV has already decided what I want to watch.
