Oh that's great news \s
Do other people read these types of headings and just think immediately about how freaking scary this stuff is going to get...if it's actually accurate ?
Do other people read these types of headings and just think immediately about how freaking scary this stuff is going to get...if it's actually accurate ?
When it's a text message it's likely going to ring a bell somewhere (hopefully an alarm bell), if it is a voice message and it sounds like the original many more people are going to fall for it.
The scammer starts a video call with the person they want to impersonate and record it. When that person takes the call, the scammer doesn't say anything. This creates a 5-10 seconds video of the person looking at the camera waiting for the scammer to say something, until they get fed up and hung up.
The scammer then calls the victim. They offer a video call as verification straight away, and they play that short video.
E.g. in the EU we have ID cards and passports with biometric information and NFC, and there was a beta of a phone app by the French government where it would read your photo from the ID card/passport, and compare with a video selfie. That way you get fully local and secure identification allowing you to do stuff online that would otherwise require you to show up in person to a government office.
1. Ignore voice messages
2. Ask pointed questions to any live caller, esp. one calling from a new number and asking for money...
"In case we get cut off, what phone number can I call you back on?"
If they actually give you a number instead of hanging up (which has NEVER happened in the many times I've used this line), just hang up immediately and call them back, to see if they answer.
EDIT: Also looking forward to AIs scamming each other, fully-automated.
As soon as AI gets out of hand and starts randomly hacking things we're probably out of luck anyways.
“If the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence is inevitable, well it stands to reason that when they take power, our digital overlords will punish those of us who did not help them get there. [...]” - Bertram Gilfoyle
In this bleak scrape the bottom of the barrel world, I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before customer service departments start selling voice data to the highest bidder. And to counter that there will be services where everyone ends up using voice changers, except close personal contacts. I want this fiction to stay fiction.
As opposed to what? Writing is even easier to forge, no?
As a millennial, I'm way ahead of you on that one. The government and telecom companies just need to crack down on number spoofing. Any day now..
With AI we have lost all privacy and identity. This makes nonsense like novelty theory and timewave zero seem less nonsensical. Lets hope we make it through the great filter.
My thoughts on this are that oftentimes things at the extreme ends of the distribution are usually in some way, shape or form problematic. Compared to all other living creatures we know of, humans are right at the extreme tail end of the intelligence distribution, and the result is somewhat pathological when compared to other creatures. I think nothing that's north of a certain threshold required to make advanced technology can make it through the great filter without destroying itself in the process.
Of all my concerns for humanity, excessive intelligence is not one of them...
Our earliest (and easiest to detect) transmissions should already be far enough away to be far below ambient noise I think/hope. So maybe we made it through unless someone starts shouting. Own-goals are also certainly a thing, but it would take a serious mistake to end all of us, or even set us back that far technologically on a geologic time scale.
I must be a pessimist in this regard. I don't necessarily think it would take a serious mistake, rather just the nature of complexity itself will likely become a factor at some point and I can imagine certain scenarios playing out based off that.
When you compare the length of time of humanity spent pre-neolithic-revolution with the short ~14,000 odd years since, I can't help but feel our current trajectory won't see us reach hundreds of thousands more years into the future without a serious backslide in that time.
Humanity is pretty darn resilient, but the last few years have highlighted to me that modern day life is some weird fantasy land we've created for ourselves that has an expiry date at some point in the future.
The government just should give you a card sized mini computer with 2 large primes stored in it, and everyone is perfectly fine. In fact, more secure, than the current situation?
It'd be better to ask something personal. "What did we do to Christmas/Birthday/[other event] last year? Who was with us?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Computer#/media/File:Pri...
“ Here’s my new account number. It’s really me. Slippers in the toaster.”
My primary worry is for criminal misuse. There's a class of scams where the scammers find elderly victims, call them, and pretend to be their children or grandchildren on vacation in a plausible city and suddenly in need of money to help get their passport back or a ticket home.
There are any number of cases where I have accepted an order worth large sums of money over the phone from someone I have previously dealt with and feel familiar with their voice.
https://www.fidelity.com/security/fidelity-myvoice/overview
https://www.schwab.com/voice-id
https://blogs.perficient.com/2016/04/18/3-benefits-of-vangua...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21142782/india-politician...
The unendorsed version is far more dangerous.
That said, I don't understand why the parent and the article paint this as a bad thing.
It's a new use of technology to repeat an old lie. I think it's a bad thing, but it's hardly the most dangerous and novel application of this technology for evil.
Do you understand what is first-past-the-post voting system?
The only possible solution I have seen being talked about is digitally signing any and all "real" content, similar to GPG/SSH.
I don’t think it’s elitist to think many people will be duped. I think it’s arrogant to think you won’t.
There's also the unravelling biography of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos#Scandals (you know someone's doing well when their "scandals" section has ten subheadings! And that's all old-fashioned manual fraud)
(I'm now wondering how far you could get with an elected official who's entirely deepfaked and only appears in recordings. Probably all the way to being sworn in, at which point someone has to appear in person. People have occasionally been elected despite being dead, so it's not impossible)
If electoral boards around the country or at the national level were all sounding the alarm for irregularity in voting returns or procedures then an election might have been stolen. As it stands, the election results match the earlier polls which is a strong indicator that, at best, the election became a tossup at the time it was held, and the military also didn't find any reason to suspect fraud or error.
Unless the people doing the swearing in are also fake.
This matters a loooot more than the smart enough people realize too, because it's so difficult to imagine what it's like being south of that threshold, the potential consequences are difficult to imagine.
> Or do you think you yourself will fall for this as well?
Yes.
If the news confirms what they think is the truth, it doesn't need manipulation, just a fake heading
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/climate-protest-ukraine-bo...
for example (and in that case it even had the true caption on the video, just not in English)
Maybe, just maybe, human society will move back to personal interaction, since apparently you cannot trust call, voice and video, anymore in the future.
Which implies a much narrower, less diverse, more elitist system of both politics and economy, as it gets harder to trust people from outside your existing circle.
Unfortunately the move towards it is nothing new, we gradually lost text and images and now the remaining media is closing.
This will probably decimate online public forums completely and off-person communications will en up being P2P through trusted devices. Closed communities in WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Discord already replaced forums.
Maybe if infestation of closed communities with machines becomes a thing, maybe the real life gatherings will make a comeback?
I don't know but I used to mock Sci-Fi movies about portraying aliens as uncivilised that don't seem to have the means to have developed all that tech but I'm no longer sure. Maybe what will happen is, we will create a symbiotic life where machine will no longer be tools but partners and they will take care of us to reduce us to our basic instinct.
> No video, audio, or text can be presumed real unless signed by the human subject.
Where is the controversy in that?
Follow the thou g ht through to how it would work and what it would mean in terms of privacy for the average person.
Your niceties seem dystopian to me.
Companies can't even wrap their heads around sim swapping scams and social engineering of secret questions.
Journalists would have a hard time showing that an interviewee actually said what claim they said.
Wire-tapping by the police also would become useless in court.
⇒ I would adjust it to “unless it has a reliably chain of trust”. That would mean that people could judge differently about whether to accept some things as true, but I think that’s unavoidable.
But hey, at least this will solve the problem of journalists quoting people out of context: they won't be able to claim you've said something without you personally signing off on it with your cryptographic key.
I don't quite understand what you mean. We already trust phones and computers not to be compromised for things like online banking, so why not allow these devices to sign recordings using keys lent to them by the main trust device? You could allow revocation of these keys.
Sorta, kinda. "We already trust phones and computers" because we have no better alternatives yet.
There's a reason online banking is at the front of the push for device attestation, and thanks for Google happily obliging, rooting your Android phone is pretty much pointless now. This is coupled with a parallel push to do your banking through a mobile app, or at least to use it as a second authentication factor, which makes the app necessary just as much. This means we're already undergoing the transition I'm talking about: in the nearby future, you'll have to use a pristine, unrooted, unmodded phone from a blessed corporate vendor, to perform basic functions like paying for things and managing your account. And yes, such device will be appropriate for signing everything else too - and the vendor owning the key will be your Trust Authority.
All digitally approved contracts I‘ve ever encountered were e-"signed" (i.e. me emulating a paper signature at a computer), not digitally signed, due to lack of a mutually trusted public key infrastructure.
In that sense, I would be sad but not surprised if we instead moved to a system of "trusted recording devices", where scanners, cameras and microphones by some vendors are defined to be trusted, signing their outputs and leaving the underlying workflows (signatures, recordings of verbal affirmations etc.) largely untouched.
I think that's a pretty apt summary of the state of digital ID in Germany: Commendable technical basis (with some privacy-preserving aspects too, including selective assertions, e.g. "older than 18" or "EU citizen").
When I called about actually getting such an ID card (several times) as a non-citizen, which is explicitly mentioned as a feature of the scheme, I only received the acoustic equivalent of blank stares.
For that reason, Germany introduced a "non-identity" (i.e. not doubling as a photo ID) e-signature card in 2021, but apparently almost nobody is requesting it, so most administrative offices don't know how to issue one...
It'll be interesting when someone releases the first MMO which combines GPT models and VO generation to fill out the in-universe world with dynamic characters who can react to surrounding events.
My employer is known for tracking a decade behind the curve and we already have financial processes in place to prevent this vector from being exploited. That leads me to believe the majority must already have as well.
That is, you have a "filter bubble" which tells you that there isn't going to be a Nigerian prince with some money waiting for you (unknown sender, unlikely message). Reduced cost fakes force people to make their filter bubble smaller by raising the threshold for faking. More broadly, the question of "high trust vs. low trust" society.
What cases do you think it will be used wrongly in? It can't do 1:1 realistic phone calls, the processing it'd need for that is beyond the reach of any average user.
I just would like this so I can copy-paste books/text and listen to it in the voices of my favorite narrators, but can't have that, can we? No, it'll be super dangerous, I'll listen myself to nuking a country or some such.
Spreading propaganda is the most obvious use case, assuming the resource requirement remains high. I don’t think it’s far-fetched either. If these models become less resource-hungry, then we’re in for much worse.
If you really like them and their work, why would you want a forgery?
If you can't see the danger in this, perhaps it's more that you're ok with it.