Scientist Raises Concern On AI Misuse
By PELUMI Olaleye
Asian tiger computer scientist, Mr Supasorn Suwajanakorn has raised concern over the futuristic misuse of artificial intelligence to defame or destroy’s people.
Speaking to a large audience recently at a stakeholders’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) forum, he said, “Fake videos could do a lot of damage even before anyone has a chance to verify, so it’s very important that we make everyone aware of what is currently possible so we can have the right assumptions and be critical about what we see”.
He further stated that the concept to create photos into holocaust was the beginning of creativity but “These results seem very realistic and intriguing, but at the same time frightening. One thing that concerns me is its potential for misuse.
“My inspiration for this work was a project meant to preserve our last chance for learning about the holocaust from the survivors. It allows you to have interactive conversations with a hologram of a real holocaust survivor.
“At a point I began to wonder, can we create a model like this for anyone? A model that look, talks and acts just like them. I eventually came up with a new solution, that can build a model of a person using existing photos and videos of a person”.
He further explained that they introduced a new technique that can reconstruct a high-detailed 3D face model from any image without ever 3D scanning the person.
“And here’s the same output model from different views. This also works on videos by running the same alogrithm on each video frame and generating a moving 3D model. What’s fascinating about this is that the photo collection can come from your typical photos. It doesn’t really matter what expression you are making or where you took this photos. What matters is that they are a lot of them.
“And we are still missing color here, so next, we developed a new blending technique that improves upon a single averaging method and produces sharp facial textures and colors.
He however lamented on the misuse of these results that seem very realistic and intriguing, but at the same time frightening.
“One thing that concerns me is its potential for misuse.People have been thinking about these photos for a long time, since the days when photoshop first hit the market. As a researcher, i am also working on a counter measure technology, and i am part of an ongoing effort at AI Foundation, which uses a combination of machine learning and human moderators to detect fake images and videos, fighting against my own work.
“One of the tools we plan to release is called Reality Defender, which is a web-browser plug-in that can flag potentially fake content automatically, right in the browser”.