Deep fakes appear in Facebook scam | Opinion ...
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Deep Fakes: The Rising Concern in the Age of AI
If you read anything in 2023 on current events, you surely learned about AI, or artificial intelligence. What’s AI? On a basic level, it is the science of making machines that can think, reason, recognize patterns, judge, and make decisions like humans. One reason we heard so much about AI in 2023 was because Open AI, a software firm, launched Chat GPT, a chatbot.
Chat GPT is a language tool designed to answer questions and help you with tasks, such as composing emails, essays, writing computer code, movie scripts, you name it. One of the fears about AI is it makes the ability to create “deep fakes,” or phony audio or video, much easier and more difficult to detect. You can see how this might concern anyone interested in preventing fraud.
The Reality of Deep Fakes in Scams
It turns out this is a justified concern. A member of my own family lost $70 last week to a deep fake. Ben is highly intelligent and develops software for a living. Ben received a Facebook friend request from a real friend, Johnny. Then Ben received a series of Facebook Messenger messages from Johnny. Johnny said he “got in a jam in Japan” and needed $70 to extract himself from this jam. Now Ben knew something of Johnny’s history, and “getting in a jam” was commonplace in Johnny’s life. So, Ben sent $70 through Cashapp.
But when Johnny asked for more money, something tickled Ben as funny about this. He looked more closely at Johnny’s Facebook account and saw photographs and videos showing Ben in Japan. Something about these images looked phony. Because they were created by AI. They were deep fakes.
Someone hacked into Johnny’s Facebook account, sent out a bunch of new friend requests, and created completely new content for the Facebook profile, to bolster the story of trouble in Japan. Facebook account takeovers like this are ridiculously commonplace. Their goal, just like in Ben’s case, is to tap friends for cash to handle some dire emergency. The use of deep fake videos and images is something not reported to me before now.
Paraphrasing the writer Ogden Nash, “Progress might have been alright once, but we’ve had too much of it lately.” If you have a wide enough circle of social media friends and contacts, it’s inevitable you’re going to get a phony ask for money to help a friend in need. Resist the temptation to help out. Do your best to verify the situation by getting in touch with your friend outside of social media. If you can’t verify it, ignore it.
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