What I think was the main ethical issue with the discussion on Monday was how individuals and society can be influenced by the manipulated data. There was a consensus on the most important and urgent ethical issue, which was privacy regarding personal information. This is because some people use personal information for commercial or political purposes. Moreover, there was a discussion about Deepfake videos, which are fake videos that people cannot really distinguish from the real videos with naked eyes. This artificial intelligence and deep learning technique have been already used for making pornographic against celebrities and politicians.
Examples above are both about how manipulated data deeply impact how we see understand and absorb fake things on the world. Based on our personal information, companies make different advertisement tailored to each personality, and politicians give different types of messages. This can be dangerous because it can be a new phase that polarizes our society, divided by those who have big data and those who don’t have access to big data.
Deepfake videos are also huge problems as well. We all know the famous fake video of Obama giving a speech but he did not actually. Even though deepfake vidoes are yet used politically as much as they are for making pornographic, as the deep learning and artificial intelligence get better every time, it is a matter of time that we might see fake videos that instigate, reproduce and spread out hatred and disinformation.
Nevertheless, there is not a substantial solution to these problems since they are uncontrollable and inevitable unless every person quit using the internet. Thus, each individual, especially those people who manage websites and portals, need to be more responsible.
The digital world is praised for its milestones for connecting people across the world and increasing the speed of data transfer. In the words of Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility. With this in mind, I want to elaborate upon your ending phrase, “need to be more responsible”, with ways to catch and prevent Deep-fakes. One way to expose Deep-feks lies on the simple process of blinking.
It was this task that 3 college students from the University at Albany set out to solve. In their research, they aimed to use computers to help people tell truth from Deep-fakes. To do so, “Our method is based on detection of eye blinking in the videos, which is a physiological signal that is not well presented in the synthesized fake videos” (Li). Why blinking? They proclaim that deep fake videos blink a lot less frequent in comparison with real people. This way, it makes it very clear on how to spot a Deep-fake no matter how realistic the graphics may be.
Although their research solves one aspect of Deep-fake videos, their current method only uses the lack of blinking as a cue for detection. Their research may be useless in a couple of months or years, but their efforts demonstrated the passion needed to combat false information in our Digital Age.
Article:
Li, Y., Chang, M., & Lyu, S. (2018). In Ictu Oculi: Exposing AI Created Fake Videos by Detecting Eye Blinking. 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS). doi:10.1109/wifs.2018.8630787
As stated from before, technology has certainly advanced in the case of how advanced it is in the modern era, as said before, it has the ability to use such technological advancements to the advantage of the market. However, at one point or another, people will find drawbacks in technology, mostly pertaining to common human misuse.
As stated in the previous article, the case of which people are essentially being observed in their activities proves to be ethically questionable. People have always been cautious about anything that pertains to their safety. Companies don’t appear to have the intent of doing harm to a person, simply wishing to use the information for advertisements, but even so, this brings the question to just how ethical information gathering really is .