Crime from the holodeck

 

Image from Pixabay

You walk through a corridor that looks like all the other corridors, but eventually you stand in front of that one door. It whizzes open with that typical sound and you enter the room behind it. But no, you are no longer in a room at all. You are in a lush forest, hearing birds chirping and a stream babbling. And yet you really haven't walked outside, for the simple reason that you are on board a spaceship.

Some of the readers fully understand what I am talking about, others will hopefully also continue to read with curiosity. For the latter group, an explanation: you are on board a spaceship from Star Trek, the still popular science fiction series from deep into the last century, where in the 24th century they have the holodeck: a room in which holograms and force fields generate simulations of people, objects and environments. It all looks, feels, sounds and smells completely realistic and you can even touch things. The holodecks are mainly used for recreation and training purposes. The simulated environment can appear much larger than the space occupied by the holodeck. That's why you can walk through that forest for hours. But you could just as easily sit in a virtual cafe or play a game of tennis.

In the 1980s, when the holodeck appeared in Star Trek, this was an example of virtual reality avant la lettre. Only in the following decade did consumer versions of VR headsets become widespread – you know, those ski goggles with built-in screens and preferably speakers on the side, which immerse you in a sometimes frighteningly realistic illusion. You have to experience it to understand it.

As often happens with inventions that advance humanity, the technology to create virtual realities (a contradiction in terms if you ask me) has also been put to bad use. Because nowadays we have artificial intelligence (also a term with a built-in contradiction). AI is used by cybercriminals to present a false reality to their victims. Like that mother I was talking about a while ago, who really thought she heard her son on the phone saying that he had had an accident. You don't always have to set up a complete environment like a holodeck to get someone to believe something. Sometimes it's just a matter of showing, making it heard, felt or smelled what fits in a certain context. And criminals are particularly useful at this.
I call that AI crime.

If you regularly read the articles in the And in the big bad world... section below, you will have seen many events lately that will promote AI crime: a Brit who - if elected to the House of Commons – lets himself be controlled by AI, a student who has applied AI to cheat, 'intelligent' toothbrushes and other household appliances, and especially not to forget AI functions that are increasingly being built into everyday software.

Will you still be able to distinguish between fake and real? Is your perception complete? Already in the era of chemical photography (film, darkroom, chemicals) the truth was violated by retouching photos. Often to make them more attractive, but there are also group photos of important Soviet Union people in which disgraced comrades have been erased. They have been cancelled, we would say nowadays. With digital photos, photoshopping is a piece of cake. And you've probably seen portraits that claim to be AI-generated. Had you not been given that information, you probably would have thought you were looking at a real human being. And the same goes with sound: the criminal obtains a recording of someone saying something and then his AI application can make the same voice say something different. This can also be achieved analogously: in presentations I often show a video in which you think you see and hear the actor Morgan Freeman - the visual part is indeed made with AI, but the voice is 'simply' deepfaked by a voice actor.

Virtual reality and artificial intelligence form a fertile couple. If you put their abbreviations together, you get vrai. That is the French word for truth, or reality. Isn’t that bizarre?

 

And in the big bad world...

... unfortunately I didn't have time to fill this section this time due to a day off.