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FTC proposes new protections to combat AI impersonation of individuals
- IronWolve 3y agoSo individuals still have fair use for protests and comedy?
- twoodfin 3y agoThe FTC’s power only extends to commercial activity, and in this case it appears limited to implied (impersonated) commercial endorsements.
- dang 3y agoUrl changed from https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-ftc-bans-ai-impersonations-of-individuals-and-unveils-greater-powers-to-win-stolen-money-back https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-ftc-bans-ai-imper..., which points to this.
- aetherspawn 3y agoPeople don’t want to be impersonated by deepfake. Artists don’t want their art style copied. Writers don’t want to be out of business or have the price of their work degraded by GPT spam. There are a lot of things people don’t want AI to do, but I can’t want for them to use AI to remaster Star Trek Next Gen (and other old sci-fi) into 4K. This kind of application hurts nobody.
- celdon25 3y agoPersonally I’d rather AI be used to help fix society and health issues. Help people thrive and survive, things like that.
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoHuman problems can only be solved by humans, not technology.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoI’m not sure that’s true, are you suggesting the internet hasn’t solved a single human problem?
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoNope. It hasn't solved anything.
- jerbear4328 3y agoWow, that's a pretty strong opinion. You do see that you are on a website on the internet right now, having conversations and discussions with strangers who could be from anywhere in the world, about technology and stuff that never would have happened before the internet.
- upfrog 3y agoIs this an accurate representation of your meaning? Because technology has been relentlessly solving or making progress on solving human problems for thousands of years. Agriculture alone is a series of technological improvements which have solved an unfathomably number of instances of the "I have no food" problem, one of the most recurring and fundamental problems of all life. Avoiding diseases, healing injuries, trying to get three states over in a hurry because you heard your grandfather is about to die, communicating without being intercepted, satisfying wanderlust, making communication easier - all of these are very human problems which have been fully or partially solved by technology.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoAgreed, but these things are actually harder than upscaling star trek unfortunately.
- Legend2440 3y agoIt's not an either-or. People will try it for all sorts of things and keep the ones that are useful.
- ben_jones 3y ago> I can’t want for them to use AI to remaster Star Trek Next Gen (and other old sci-fi) into 4K. This kind of application hurts nobody. If the remaster only improves video and audio fidelity sure. But they may also swap out characters, personalities, and plot points, based on the whims of the studio. AI controlled by major powerbrokers is going to further the aims of those power brokers.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoIf there’s a good tool floating around to do the upscaling, I bet committed fandoms are about as likely as major companies to gain access. Superfans wont care about copyright. The only way that wouldn’t seem likely to me is if the company owns or unilaterally controls the tool, which we haven’t seen any indication is a likely business model.
- hammock 3y agoThe original Star Wars trilogy is now ruined because of overzealous “remastering”
- teekert 3y agoWasn't TNG shot on film and remastered [yes: 0]? Not sure if it made it to 4K, and it probably could use some AI clean up. I did read that DS9 was scaled up with "AI" because it was mostly CGI. I read on reddit that fans are even doing it, with mixed results. [0] https://trekmovie.com/trek-remastered/tng-remastered/ https://trekmovie.com/trek-remastered/tng-remastered/
- megmogandog 3y agoI'm curious why you would want 4K in this case? I was over at a family member's place and threw on an episode of TNG to kill time. I was trying to figure out why everything looked so cheap: Picard's uniform, other costumes, the alien makeup. It was because they'd increased the definition past what the sets, costumes, and makeup were designed for. Personally I prefer the fuzzy look which appears more 'realistic' to me.
- suby 3y agoThis is a good point, but AI also will allow us to enhance the video in other ways than upscaling, such as inserting (or replacing) CGI / special effects. We should be able to really up the visuals.
- aetherspawn 3y agoI saw a fan-made AI 4K remaster (Star Trek Borg) and it was a lot better than the remastered Star Trek on Amazon prime. I think the AI adds crispness that was not captured due to limitations in the cameras (and skill of the cameramen) at the time. Possibly it also fakes textures to make them more visually appealing.
- andy99 3y agoThe pictures I see from iPhones look like a better photographer took them zoomed out but gross and make zoomed in because of all the weird filtering. Isn't that basically what AI upsampling does? It doesn't add information, so it's somehow imagining what an optimal image will look like. Personally I'd rather pass when it comes to video.
- ututuutut 3y agoI would be so, so happy if Apple would just give users the option to turn off all the AI crap on the camera. It sucks so bad. I have an 8MP Canon point and shoot from 2008 that takes way better pictures than my iphone 15. And I'm not surprised that a larger sensor with larger, better glass takes better pictures with finer detail and less grain, I just wish more people understood what they're buying. I've seen a few "4K" AI-upscaled movies and they look horrible. Rubber faces and uncanny valley effects every few seconds. What a shame. I'll stick with 1080P on blu-ray.
- CommieBobDole 3y agoFYI there's professionally-done remasters of TNG into 1080 - it was shot on film originally, not video. And there's a decent-quality fan upscale of DS9; it was shot on film, too, but the remaster of TNG didn't sell all that great and the studios didn't want to spend the money on DS9.
- runsfromfire 3y agoI don’t understand who the audience is for 4K up scales. I’ve never seen one that looks better than the original resolution, and any halfway decent screen will be able to match your content’s resolution and framerate. I consider myself a quality-enthusiast when it comes to media and I won’t touch something upscaled. Some stuff was meant to be seen in SD.
- janalsncm 3y agoSeems like this is broader than just AI impersonation. It also would include a person claiming to be from the government when they’re not. > Falsely imply government or business affiliation by using terms that are known to be affiliated with a government agency or business (e.g., stating “I’m calling from the Clerk’s Office” to falsely imply affiliation with a court of law). My first thought on this was great, I’m glad the FTC is doing something about this and I’m surprised it wasn’t already regulated by the FTC. My second thought was the majority of this type of fraud is probably from foreign impersonation, not Americans. And it’s not like they’d be sending in predator drones for surgical strikes against scam call centers, as satisfying as that might be. My third thought was that having this on the books and keeping a record of these violations will give the FTC leverage to crack down on telecoms that don’t do anything about it.
- codetrotter 3y ago“Hello sir I am calling from Windows support.”
- cyanydeez 3y agoindeed, almost no novel criminality or fraud is occuring. robocalls should just be illegal. unidentified propaganda should be banned. ads with fraudulent claims should be prosecuted. you can argue about "to what degree" but AI isn't doing anything but exposing the true lack of enforcing of existing laws because of capitalism grease.
- llamaimperative 3y ago> but AI isn't doing anything but exposing the true lack of enforcing of existing laws because of capitalism grease. This is just a dismissive way of saying “AI isn’t doing anything but making the problem worse.”
- cyanydeez 3y agoright. I guess my opinion is "they already weren't tracking the type of fraud AI is capable; they weren't enforcing fraudulent activity..." AI just makes it more numerous. a non story. "sorry guys, we're still not regulating white color fraud"
- thesis 3y agoIsn't fraud already illegal?
- wmf 3y agoThey think there will be additional deterrence by making it super illegal. See "identity theft" for a previous example.
- aitchnyu 3y agoSo, did their action solve it?
- hammock 3y agoYes and assaulting someone is also illegal (whether with a weapon or not), reckless driving is also illegal (whether you are drunk or not), and violent hate crimes are illegal (whether you had discriminatory hate in your heart or not)
- Cheer2171 3y agoFraud has to be prosecuted by the Dept of Justice. Deceptive business practices can be independently pursued by the FTC.
- PeterisP 3y agoThe existing criminal process can prosecute fraud after the fact; but there are potential FTC regulations which could make it either harder to commit it or easier to detect it, acting as a deterrent before fraud is done.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoToo bad scammers couldn’t care less what the FTC decides just based on the crap coming into my physical mailbox, email inbox, and calls and texts.
- spazx 3y agoNor the FCC. I just got a call from a contractor-recruiter call center. (About half of them are scams, but you can't tell, because they all sound like the same foreign call center.) The caller ID said "Public Service". That has got to be illegal?
- evolvingstuff 3y agoI suspect in the near future there will be a number of cases where individuals will intentionally release a bunch of AI "chaff", in the sense that having a very large number of bad videos/texts about them, of which many are clearly false, will disguise the actual bad behavior. I'm not sure what term/phrase will be used for this particular tactic, but I am absolutely certain one will arise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hammock 3y agoThis almost certainly already happens, just without AI. For one example look at the surfeit of UFO stories, many of which can be plausibly attributed to state efforts to cloud intelligence about actual classified air and space technology
- anigbrowl 3y agoThis (minus the AI part until now) is pretty much the strategy of political operator Steve Bannon, who pithily summarized it as 'flood the zone with shit'. Think of all those junk 'news' sites that are just barely curated content farms using automated 'spinners' to pump out content, rage farming pundits etc.
- Plasmoid 3y agoThis is already a thing but it's more for people with money right now. There are a lot of 'reputation management services' whose job is to flood out bad press and replace it with anything else.
- hx8 3y agoThis was a plot point in the 2019 Neal Stephenson novel Fall; or, Dodge In Hell. In an effort to prove information on the internet was unreliable a massive spam/defamation campaign was launched on a person -- to the point that the information was unbelievable and it was obviously fake. In the novel, despite several attempts from different parties to encourage people to think more critically about what they read on the internet, highly sensational AI generated content radicalizes and stupefies the population.
- karmasimida 3y agoAI watermarking would be a boom business.
- PeterisP 3y agoWhy would the scammers apply watermarking to their fraudulent data? Or do you expect that FTC somehow will make the open source generative models disappear worldwide?
- karmasimida 3y agoI meant some watermarking that can’t be redone even if the weights are shared It is still an open question but I think money will be dumped into this area, for protection of IPs and compliance
- PeterisP 3y ago> I meant some watermarking that can’t be redone even if the weights are shared I've been working a bunch on neural networks, and I'm quite convinced that this isn't possible (as in, not that we haven't built a tool for this yet, but that it's not possible to build such a tool and weights can always be redone) - I'm not wholly certain as I have been surprised before, but I'd need to see some evidence to even consider this as plausible. Fine-tuning can change a lot, adversarial examples can target very specific aspects of the model. Furthermore, people do train models from scratch - even if 99.9% of models would include unremovable watermarks, all fraudsters need is for a single unmarked model to exist; and if it doesn't, they can fund the GPU-time to train one since they're running a high-revenue business, fraud has more money than academia.
- MR4D 3y agoKey words - “allow for civil penalties”. Civil is a much lower bar than criminal when it comes to court cases.
- reocha 3y agoUnfortunately the cat is it out of the bag, we can't simply legislate this away.
- malfist 3y agoThe same thing has been said before. Doesn't make it true. Lawn mower manufacturers said they couldn't make lawnmowers safe, it was impossible. Until the government mandated that they had too.
- reocha 3y agoLawnmowers can't emulate the president of the united states.
- scoofy 3y agoPeople respond to incentives. We have insanely high quality printers, yet we do not have much counterfeiting. Just because we can do something easily and illicitly, doesn't mean that people will do things illicitly if the proper instinctive structure is implemented.
- reocha 3y agoWhat proper incentive structure do you suggest? There are plenty of protections for printers and even then we do have (printer based and otherwise) counterfeiting. We are talking about a software based solution that can emulate any public figure (locally) that the average person will not be able to recognize. This is a categorical risk to the information age
- bobthepanda 3y agowe can't legislate it away, but we can throw the book at people who do. i don't understand why the knee jerk cynical response is "why bother," as if that will make the problem better.
- reocha 3y ago
- hansonpeter 3y ago[dead]
- jmorrice 3y agoWhen dealing with Western actors, this is symmetric warfare. If you are a political party and the opposition impersonates you, you could do the same back. What concerns me is the asymmetric threat such as posed by North Korean dollar groups. For the uninitiated, this is a real threat but let's for a moment not think about the silliness of present day Communists getting extremely ruthless about stacking cash. The model I'm concerned about is, say you have a NK hacker group and they make a very, very convincing video of a CEO doing something embarrassing (shout out a former UK PM's alleged porcine initiation ritual) with a view to making cash. These people are focussed on the bottom line. They could structure their extortion demand to be F.O. money and get paid with little fuss. And do it over and over. On the one hand the replicability of such attacks concerns me. However I have been considering a future where we are embarrassed or exposed to embarrassing content on an industrial scale. Embarrassment is a social concept that we all deal with, and deal with it we do. It could be that the AI impersonation mess gets so bad we all become inoculated to this type of content because virtually everyone notable has become a victim already. Could it become the cost of doing business?
- Nevermark 3y ago> When dealing with Western actors, this is symmetric warfare. If you are a political party and the opposition impersonates you, you could do the same back. No it isn’t symmetric. There is no balance between party A being fraudulent so party B now needs to be fraudulent. In both cases, the public C is the victim. A permissive tit for tat view of fraud, simply encourages an arms race of victimization. Organized crime groups compete too. That competition doesn’t result in some kind of optimal societal impact balance in the absence of legal responses either.
- ranger_danger 3y ago[flagged]
- Animats 3y agoThis is the controversial provision, the "means and instrumentalities" clause. Existing law covers people running impersonation scams. The big question is, what responsibilities, if any, do sellers of tools have? The draft language: § 461.5 Means and Instrumentalities: Provision of Goods or Services for Unlawful Impersonation Prohibited. It is a violation of this part, and an unfair or deceptive act or practice to provide goods or services with knowledge or reason to know that those goods or services will be used to: (a) materially and falsely pose as, directly or by implication, a government entity or officer thereof, a business or officer thereof, or an individual, in or affecting commerce as commerce is defined in the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 44); or* (b) materially misrepresent, directly or by implication, affiliation with, including endorsement or sponsorship by, a government entity or officer thereof, a business or officer thereof, or an individual, in or affecting commerce as commerce is defined in the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 44).* It's the "with knowledge or reason to know" clause that's key here. Various industry parties have already commented on this, some wanting stronger language there to protect sellers of general purpose tools for creating content. Sellers of automated outbound marketing tools which can be used to deliver impersonation scams might be caught up by this.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoThere's a conflict of interest at play. The law as you point out is rarely enforced, so tool providers are willing to look the other way and accrue revenues from the spammers. What needs to happen is that the liability should be clear and present danger when a reasonable tool provider knows X is a spammer, and they don't investigate (or take action) the cost of maintaining that customer should be many times greater than the revenue from it. This should be particularly true if a spammer is reported by a consumer (Which is a strong signal). Right now, the situation is reversed.
- someguydave 3y agoInteresting, I suspect all the mobile providers in the US are sitting on a pretty big pile of evidence from customer reports about which upstream voip providers are willing to host scammers
- parasense 3y agoSeems to me people are not easily impersonated. However, the false belief that a proxy persona, such as remote telephone, video call, or any other non in-person interaction are what give rise to impersonation. Might as well simply say that all persona non-gratis communications are unenforcable.