From New York Times
A.I. Is Making Death Threats Way More Realistic
By Tiffany Hsu
Even though she was toughened by years spent working in internet activism, Caitlin Roper found herself traumatized by the online threats she received this year.
There was the picture of herself hanging from a noose, dead. And another of herself ablaze, screaming.
The posts were part of a surge of vitriol directed at Ms. Roper and her colleagues at Collective Shout, an Australian activist group, on X and other social media platforms. Some of it, including images of the women flayed, decapitated or fed into a wood chipper, was seemingly enabled — and given a visceral realism — by generative artificial intelligence. In some of the images, Ms. Roper was wearing a blue floral dress that she does, in fact, own...
“Two things will always happen when technology like this gets developed: We will find clever and creative and exciting ways to use it, and we will find horrific and awful ways to abuse it,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “What’s frustrating is that this is not a surprise.”
Until recently, artificial intelligence could replicate real people only if they had a huge online presence, such as film stars with throngs of publicly accessible photos. Now, a single profile image will suffice, said Dr. Farid, who co-founded GetReal Security, a service that identifies malicious digital content. (Ms. Roper said she had worn the blue floral dress in a photo published a few years ago in an Australian newspaper.)
“From the perspective of identity, everyone’s vulnerable,” Dr. Farid said...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
