Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1208016
06.02.2020 8 OPINION Alexiei Dingli Prof Alexiei Dingli is a Professor of AI at the University of Malta and has been conducting research and working in the field of AI for more than two decades, assisting different companies to implement AI solutions. He forms part of the Malta.AI task-force, set up by the Maltese government, aimed at making Malta one of the top AI countries in the world Fake new world A few decades ago, before the ad- vent of the World Wide Web (WWW), chatrooms were a popular pass time. In those days, people realised (at their own expense) that the person on the other side of the screen might not be the person who he or she claims to be. ere were cases where people started a virtual relationship which eventually blossomed in an engagement. But oth- ers were not so lucky, and in a particular case, a woman in the US even tried to kidnap (in real-life) her ex-virtual boy- friend. ese stories did not end with the ar- rival of the WWW, but they took over a whole new level. People are now por- traying a perfect life on social media networks, and some of them are the envy of the digital world, living a life of champagne and jet-setting. Of course, most of it is fake. Worse than that, some people even go the extra mile and create fake profiles. In some cases, these people are harm- less. For them, it is merely an online game, an escape from their real-life. But there are cases where these people are predators, preying on the most vulner- able of people. Some of these are even paedophiles! We've seen various instances report- ed in the media where children make friends with another person, thinking he or she is a peer, only to discover when they meet them in real-life that the person is a paedophile. Unfortu- nately, some of these stories do not end well. However, if you thought that this was the maximum of online fakeness, you're in for a shock. e fake world we'll ex- perience in the coming years is way more advanced. With the rise of Arti- ficial Intelligence (AI), a new area of re- search has emerged known as Synthetic Media (SM). e idea behind SM is that an AI can be used to generate images, text, voice, videos and practically any other media. Manipulated images have been around for years. Photoshop (one of the most eNective programs used to edit pic- tures) is capable of modifying existing scenes or even creating fake ones. However, just last year, Nividia an- nounced GauGAN, an impressive AI system capable of converting children like scribbles into high-resolution pho- tos. A simple line with a circle changes into a realistic picture of a waterfall next to a lake. Of course, the proliferation of manipulated photos will likely increase. Expect to see more pictures of friends travelling to fake exotic locations, show- casing their digitally enhanced bodies, while living their depressing real lives. Interest in automatic generation of textual-content started in the 50s, but in recent years, there have been some signiHcant breakthroughs. • A computer program called "Eu- gene Goostman" (which gave the im- pression that he was a teenager) was very close to fooling experts who were chatting with him, in thinking that he is a human being. • An AI system wrote a novel which managed to pass through the Hrst round of a Japanese literary prize. • Microsoft created a Poet AI ca- pable of creating poems, some of which even fooled human judges. • e Press Association in the UK is making use of AI to select, adjust and publish news stories. • And with 300,000 chatbots cur- rently live on Facebook, it is very likely that when you lodge an enquiry through a Facebook chat, you will meet one of them! But this technology has its negatives as well. OpenAI has just released an AI fake text generator. Its creators claim that the system is so good at creating fake news that they labelled it danger- ous. So expect a new wave of fake news and mass-generated spam to hit us in the coming years. After images and text, the Hnal fron- tier was video and voice. An impressive technology called Deep Fakes managed to overcome this frontier. Given a video and pictures of a person, it is capable of swapping an actor's face with that of the person. is technology is revolutionary for the movie industry since it allows Hlm- makers to make movies at a fraction of the cost. Unknown actors can act in a blockbuster Hlm only to have their face swapped with a celebrity's face in the last minute. However, this tool can also have some dangerous uses. Deep Fakes replaced the face of a pornstar in a porn movie with that of the famous actress Gal Gad- ot (Wonder Woman). In another video released online, the former president of the United States Barack Obama slams Donald Trump. And the list of similar cases can go forever. Of course, they are all fake videos. In the coming years, expect more of these manipulations. However, the AI algorithms are becoming so good that it will be incredibly hard, if not impos- sible, to distinguish between truth and fiction. In these cases, there is only one hope for us, the rise of new AI systems capable of spotting these manipula- tions, alerting us and stirring us away from this fake new-world. People are now portraying a perfect life on social media networks, and some of them are the envy of the digital world, living a life of champagne and jet- setting. Of course, most of it is fake