That was the question posed last week in a webinar by the intelligence consultancy Neon Century, Mark Rowe writes.
In short: an online arms race is going on. Synthetic media – made-up voices, profiles, even videos – are trying to defraud you or fool you into believing things that aren’t true.
Neon Century brought together its own analyst Belen Carrasco Rodriguez; Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence (AI) veteran Dr Rand Waltzman; and also from the United States, Will Jack, a software engineer who works on a tool for detecting AI-generated fake faces.
But before we go to the unsettling prospect that the speakers set out, distorted or entirely invented material was part of the media of previous centuries. As that UK phenomenon Horrible Histories mocked, one of the very first wars on moving pictures – the Boer War (1899-1902) had film of nurses looking after British stretcher-patients. Except that the film was not of the battlefield in South Africa, but was made in Yorkshire. Science fiction authors have anticipated the jarring effect of not being able to trust what our senses are telling us. The British writer Douglas Adams expressed it with characteristic wit. At the end of his Mostly Harmless, he noted that he came up with the idea for his famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while travelling, in Innsbruck; a BBC publicity release said that it was in fact in Spain; if a BBC press release said it was Spain, it probably must be true, Adams concluded.
The difference between the past and now is not only the sheer amount of online stuff – hundreds of trillions of web pages; but, as Dr Waltzman pointed out, the coming ‘immersive virtual environment’, coined the metaverse, lends itself more to emotional manipulation, because the experiences inside that virtual world are more intense, have more psychological reach, than those given by TV, or the mobile phone. Waltzman’s conclusions were that the world has not begun to prepare for this digital world; and that it is ‘hopeless’ to expect law-makers or policy-makers, let alone the police who enforce laws, to catch up.
Hence Neon Century’s work for clients to seek to understand the risks of this digital world, such as ‘information laundering’, whereby fake social media accounts and invented online profiles can change one thing stated online into quite another, then amplified by the artificial accounts, which can be to the disadvantage of a business or politician (and of advantage to a rival). As our lives become more digitised, synthetic media become more sophisticated; and researchers will push the boundaries of what appears to be real audio, video or images; making fakes more difficult to detect.
More in the March 2022 print edition of Professional Security magazine.
See also the CPNI ‘think before you link‘ awareness campaign.
See also a blog by Belén Carrasco Rodríguez on the Neon Century website, that details the need for ‘online resilience’, and for corporate security to know what is being said by and about the corporation’s executives, in case of, for example, an online boycott campaign, whereby ‘hashtags were artificially amplified by bots and other inauthentic accounts’; and ‘once the laundered information becomes part of the news cycle, the effects of the laundering process become irreversible’.
The consultancy advises businesses to assess against such ‘information laundering’ risks, and for intelligence, risk and public relations-comms teams to work together.
