A Fake AI World
OpenAI introduced Sora last week and in and outside of Outsell the world was atwitter. My colleagues speculated about loss of CGI animation jobs, especially in advertising/shorts/TV production, vanishing into thin air before too long. I immediately thought about what happens when the technology gets into the wrong hands, and it surely will. It is going to make fake photos of Taylor Swift look like child’s play. My stomach lurched at the thought of what will be possible and none of it was pretty.
And if that wasn’t bad enough we reported a headline in Tuesday’s Outsell Doorway about academic journal Frontiers stepping quite literally on their you-know-what by publishing a rat’s you-know-what causing an embarrassing retraction — all due to yup — you guessed it — the rat you-know-what photos being generated by generative AI. C’mon people!
It would seem to me if we can use this technology to CREATE fakes, we ought to be able to use it to ELIMINATE fakes. It can’t be that hard.
But nope — now we are dealing with tribunals and the likes of behemoths like Air Canada required to pay $800ish fines/refunds because their chatbot gave out mis-guided information and the airline needed to honor the misinformation the chatbot delivered about refunds for bereavement. As if the stress from the loss of a loved one is best dealt with by a machine. Great CX/UX. I get chatbots have a place and a time. But it strikes me that it’s not only bad enough to have it give out incorrect info but doing so when people need humans most is just dumb.
It’s not the $800ish fine/refund that’s really the problem. Its having your brand name visible all over the web for something so silly and misguided and then containing a defense focused on the chatbot being a ‘separate legal entity.’
Someone in corporate actually thought this stuff up and were probably back-slapping and high-fiving thinking this defense was bullet-proof. Memo to lawyers — our research is showing that the profession is using this technology without knowing all the risks…. I am left wondering if Gen AI came up with that defense in the first place!
While heads are rolling at Air Canada and Frontiers (and they ought to) the folks over at OpenAI keeps marching us down the rabbit hole of Alice and Wonderland. Politicians are asleep at the switch. We’d rather wait to fake shame Mark Zuckerberg time after time up on the hill and then proceed to do nothing about it. Sam Altman will no doubt have his day, but it’ll be too little too late and between now and then all we can bank on is more stories from the likes of Air Canada and Frontiers. We can’t drive without licenses. But we can program with impunity all day long.
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