AI vs. AI

This article talks about technologies used to produce human-like text, and "deep-fake" video and audio. The article argues that such generative AI can be used by criminals to commit fraud- but at the same time, AI can also be used on the other side to detect and prevent fraud!

You might be interested to know that the technological breakthrough that made today's realistic image and audio generation possible was in fact a form of this very idea: one AI creates fake but realistic data, while another AI attempts to detect the fake data. The two systems fight against each other in a game theoretical back-and-forth contest until both the fraudster and the fraud detector are almost perfect.

The idea, the Generative Adversarial Network, was published by Goodfellow et al. [1] in 2014 and has spread widely since then. My favorite introductory explanation of GANs is [2], which describes the generator as a money counterfeiter attempting to fraudulently submit fake dollar bills, and the discriminator as a police officer who is inspecting each dollar bill to determine whether it is real or counterfeit.

Given infinite time and memory, the mathematical result is always the same: the fraudster's output becomes perfect, and the police can only guess at random.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661

[2] https://medium.com/@ageitgey/abusing-generative-adversarial-...

This is another thing that's "done with AI now" but that has always been possible and has always been done in one form or another, in one way or another.

Here, Jello Biafra and The Melvins said it all:

  "Wholly Buy-Bull"
  
  I saw it in Newsweek
  Therefore it must be real
  Reagan and Khaddafi chatting like they're old friends
  At dinner with Abe Lincoln
  Look how the shadows don't match
  Or shots of demonstrations
  The signs are in English
  Even in countries that don't use our alphabet at all
  
  Philly 2000 Republican Convention
  I saw a booth where you could get you picture taken
  Arm in Arm with George Dubya Bush
  And it looked totally real
  Know how that makes me feel?!?!
  
  Aggghh!
  Take any image of anything
  In Photoshop nothing is real
  Nothing is fake
  So I ask you
  How many images and photos we believe are real
  Aren't
  Cars in the ads now fly
  And part the seas and swim
  Two minutes of your mouth on tape
  Is that all it takes
  To show you saying things you never said
  In the headlines, in bed
  With someone you have never met
  12XU? Easy!

> For the public, the first deep video fakes that are indistinguishable from genuine campaign videos will likely surface during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign.

Any political party not seriously thinking about how to rebut such attacks is going to be at a disadvantage for a while. And likewise this is a new frontier ready to be claimed by political operatives wishing to make their bones.

"Unfortunately, cybercriminals likewise are using AI to create their own synthetic identities"

Lol, we wish, that'd be really cyberpunk, and it'd mean people aren't lying about AI being usable outside of the lab.

But so far the only use is criminals using other peoples AI.

Like using the existing thisfacedoesnotexist.com for photos and off-shelf translate programs to stop copyright detection.

How is this different than Generative Adversarial Networks?