Creating Fake People is a Terrible Idea

A few days ago the “human computing company” Tavos announced a product called Griffin. Griffin is a “human interaction model.” Supposedly, it is the first AI product to pass a video version of the Turing Test, meaning that real people cannot tell the difference between talking to Griffin and talking to a real person—even when audio and video are allowed. This is a terrible development.

The consequences for society are likely to be disastrous—perhaps even worse than the havoc wrought by social media. People will be scammed out of their savings, mental illness will explode, loneliness will be exploited. Collectively we’ll become less able to tell reality from fantasy, tearing at the fabric of a society already under considerable stress.

Many more horrors will likely follow that we can’t even conceive of yet. (Here’s one suggestion: How about people deliberately abusing their digital avatars to satisfy the darkest corners of their psychology?) Read More: “AI Already Knows Us Too Well” Creating fake people and sending them out into the world should not be permitted, let alone celebrated. How on Earth did we get here? I first thought about this nearly a decade ago, at a conference in New York on technology and storytelling.

One presentation by a generative AI company provided a perfect illustration of the slippery slope towards fake people. Their pitch started reasonably enough. The speaker pointed out that the survivors of the holocaust in World War II were dying of old age.

This meant that German schoolchildren soon wouldn’t be able to talk to real holocaust survivors—a practice enshrined in German education to keep collective memory alive, so that history would not repeat itself. Record extensive video interviews with the remaining survivors, cut these interviews into short clips, and serve up the relevant segments when prompted by a question. So far so good: a creative solution to a challenging problem.

But what if someone asked a question for which there was no canned answer? Instead of authentic video snippets, there would now be AI-powered deepfakes able to deliver answers to any question in real time. Back in 2018 the technology was still fairly clunky, but the slippery slope towards Griffin was already coming into view.