Elder DeepFake
March 20th, 2024 by G.
The Church put out a statement on church use of AI recently.
No. 1 Daughter, who is a cheery little bird, drew our attention to this passage:
Elder Gong acknowledged that some people will weaponize AI tools. Of particular concern are deepfakes, the fictitious or malicious use of someone’s name, image, and likeness. These are most likely to happen to people — such as Church leaders — who have a recognizable face and voice, a significant amount of video and audio in the public domain, and known and motivated antagonists.
Yep.
She speculates that something like this may be the reason we are emphasizing home church and other forms of personal, direct priesthood leadership. Increasingly nothing that isn’t face to face is secure or reliable.
John Mansfield
March 20, 2024
The church has long promoted use of trusted sources. Verifiable chains of provenance will be more important when realistic fakes are easily created; every man a Hofmann. One potential good thing to come of it will be less credibility given to rumor, except by those who really like the rumors. Several years ago my son was writing an assigned essay addressing the ethics of photoshopping. His youthful take on the topic was that there are no ethical concerns because no one believes pictures are authentic.
E.C.
March 24, 2024
Yeah, my younger brother’s learning a lot about AI as part of his master’s program, and while he definitely sees its uses, he’s also been learning about the many ways in which it could be abused, the above being only a small fraction. Frankly, its applications are limited only by the imaginations of those employing the technology, and constrained only by their ethics – which is a scary thought indeed in our current world with its disregard for standards of behavior.
Elder Gong came to my town this weekend and reiterated all those points from the article, while emphasizing that AI is NOT a substitute for human connection or revelation, and that while it’s a useful tool, we should be careful not to let it override our covenant belonging to God or our fellowman.