Wrestling with Artificial Intelligence!
Resuming my digest with a new blogpost about AI and where it's going to lead us.
A lot has happened in the world since I published my last digest—India now has a new Parliament building, Karnataka resoundingly threw the BJP out of its state, The Kerala Story made more money than the last Salman Khan film, and the 2000 rupee note is also history—the list goes on.
(There’s a reason why I mention all political topics…read further)
But the most significant development so far has been the rise of ChatGPT and other such generative AI platforms.
They are powerful enough to act like human beings, even create fake images and videos with just text prompts.
Many people are slowly warming up to the wonders and also the perils of Artificial Intelligence.
I wrote a blogpost recently on the same topic—more about how we as humans will face a moral dilemma when more people start using AI. I use three real-life stories to illustrate my point.
Do give it a read: Artificial Intelligence vs Authentic Intelligence: The moral battle of the future.
In my post while the focus is on human psychology and not much on the actual tech itself, we have a real-life example from today that will illustrate how this technology can be misused.
This is the reason why I am posting this digest in such quick succession after my AI blogpost.
Wrestling with AI
You must have already been following the wrestlers protest at Jantar Mantar. Today while the new Parliament building was being inaugurated high drama was underway at the protest site—the wrestlers were evicted by the police, using force.
This image popped up first on my Twitter timeline.
It is a poignant image of the wrestlers being crushed under state force, and the flag in the frame makes it even more pertinent as a metaphor for what’s happening there.
The composition of the image was brilliant, as if shot in a studio—prompting someone in the comments to remark that this looks like an AI generated image. I suspected it for a quick microsecond too.
But then I saw video footage of this struggle and it was evident that this incident did happen and this image was real. If there was no video evidence I would probably still have some doubts over the way it was captured.
And then another image surfaced, this time of the same two wrestlers with smiling faces, in total contrast to what happened just a few moments earlier.
I found it odd. I should have suspected that something was not right, but I let it go.
A few moments later someone posted this picture.
This is the original picture where the expression on their faces is grim, matching the mood of the earlier picture.
The one shared earlier was manipulated by using AI.
Luckily many people pointed that out on Twitter, and started debunking the fake image. They say it is the handiwork of the BJP IT Cell. The term ‘BJP IT’ even started trending on Twitter.
While we are used to seeing fake news and how it’s spread, this is a first of its kind—where AI has been used to manipulate an image to skew public perception, that too in real-time.
We knew this would happen some day, but that day has arrived today.
This is just the start and we’ll continue to see more such misuse of AI going forward.
The need of the hour though is this:
Whoever made that fake AI generated image of the wrestlers smiling should be tracked down asap—this is a dangerous use of the medium to manipulate perceptions.
These are still early days. Our tracking tech must be robust and punishment swift in such cases.
Only then can we hope to have some semblance of normalcy in our world that is increasingly going to depend on AI. And it also doesn’t help that the party that rules this country is a pioneer in manufacturing sentiments and fake news.
Good luck to all of us!
Cheers!!!
Kartik Dayanand Boddapati
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