When I was a kid, I remember my grandfather having a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” corkscrew, of all things. I don’t know why that’s burned in my memory, it just is. I remember those monkeys – one covering his ears, the other covering his eyes, and the third covering his mouth. There was a good lesson in the 1960s era corkscrew.
For this post, I am referencing THIS ARTICLE in the Baltimore Sun.
Here’s my Five Bullet Brief of the article:
- Pikesville High School’s athletic director, Dazhon Darien, has been arrested for fabricating a racist AI recording of the school’s principal.
- Charges against Darien include disrupting school activities, theft, witness retaliation, and stalking.
- The offensive recording involved derogatory remarks towards Black teachers, Black students’ academic performance, and Jewish parents.
- The arrest was publicized in a press conference by Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough and Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger.
- A recommendation for Darien’s termination has been filed by the school system with a criminal investigation currently underway.
My take…
As a 40-year radio broadcaster who has thousands of hours of podcasts and recordings, and hundreds of thousands of written words, floating around cyberspace, I have been concerned about the advancing skill of artificial intelligence to create deep fakes with these readily available materials. Such fakes could be weaponized against someone with words that sound like them, but they themselves did not speak.
I believe AI deep fakes will be used in the 2024 election cycle. My advice – unless you see it with your own eyes and hear it with your own ears, in person (because you won’t be able to trust audio/video), approach with a certain degree of skepticism. Sad that we are at a time when some who pursue power will do so at the expense of the truth. But I suppose it has been that way since Cain and Abel. We just now have better tech.
By the way, the artwork that accompanies this post was generated in about three seconds using AI.
