During my time at UNESCO representing Quebec, I had the opportunity to meet experts in artificial intelligence (AI). I am fascinated by this technology that will change the face of the world for me.
At that time, the ethical debates at UNESCO, but also in the AI community, essentially concerned their impact on the labor market and their malicious use to manipulate people, especially through fake videos and audio recordings of great credibility.
This particularly worrying phenomenon called deepfake was born in 2017. Back in 2018, Deeptrace, a cybersecurity firm, identified more than 8,000 videos of this type and 15,000 in 2019. The vast majority of these videos were of pornographic nature and featured personalities, mostly women but also ordinary citizens.
We may worry about this technology hijacking elections, but it’s still pornography that dominates. Although the 2020 American election was the testing ground for this type of video, the fact remains that its impact has not been validated by empirical data.
murders and pedophilia
My fascination with AI made me think about its criminal potential. I spoke at length about this to several experts who looked at me a bit like a madman. They thought I was surfing on sci-fi a little too much since artificial intelligence is still in its infancy.
My concerns? Human-like robots with powerful artificial intelligence that would be used to gratify the most heinous perversions. Robots in the shape of children or women who could be raped or even killed again and again.
I even spoke to a criminologist, a professor at a university in Quebec, about it. And do you know what he answered me…? This could prevent rape. My arms dropped, especially as this observation came from a criminology professor. I felt transported back to prehistoric times, when prostitution was still believed to protect women from sexual assault. Nonsense!
AI framework
When experts raise red flags and call for AI oversight, they raise the same concerns I heard at UNESCO in 2018: the labor market and deepfake.
A short-term view that is of course anchored in the current advances in this technology, but obscures other fundamental ethical issues that will determine what kind of humanity we want to leave behind for future generations.
Will we ban the production of children’s robots? Will we give legal status to the machine like we do to animals to protect human sanity? Will we introduce AI hygiene into the education system like we are currently trying to do with social media?
There are still some unanswered questions, and we must not wait until we are overwhelmed by technology to answer them.
