Mind Readings: The Most Dangerous AI Use Case

In today's episode, let's talk about the most dangerous AI use case ever. And I mean ever. For those who don't remember or never read it, George Orwell's 1984, there was a whole section of the book of the book that talked about rewriting history. And the Ministry of Truth would routinely go back, take all the newspapers and articles and books and redact them and change them to whatever was the truth of the moment that the ruling regime wanted to promote. We've always been at war with East Asia.

This is not a new problem, obviously. Orwell's 1984 was written well before 1984. But AI makes it worse. The most dangerous AI use case is rewriting memory. This is a study from MIT's Media Lab.

Let's make this a little bit bigger here so we can see it on screen. In this study from MIT Media Lab, researchers tested to see whether digitally altered photos have an impact on memory. The process they followed was uh they showed test subjects a photo, uh, distracted them with unrelated tasks, showed them a second photo that had been altered, distracted them again, and then had test subjects recall the first photo. The results were scary. AI manipulation of photos more than doubled the false recall of memories that didn't happen.

AI generated content was able to implant false memories and test subjects of events that didn't happen. We can see here the first example. Uh the this was a a case where some editing occurred, and the AI edited image is what's stuck in people's heads. In the second example, um, things were removed from the background of the photo, and then people recalled the photo with those things removed. And you can see the the implications of something like this.

Now, to be clear, digital alteration of photos is decades old, right? Photoshop made its debut in the Reagan administration 37 years ago. But generative AI tools, particularly those built into Photoshop today, as well as uh Dolly and the uh mid journey, all these tools make it faster, easier, cheaper, and uh and simpler to rewrite reality to mass rewrite content because you don't need to be a Photoshop expert. You can just highlight the area and tell it with a prompt here's what I want you to change. Here's why this is a problem, in case it wasn't obvious.

There are countless authoritarian leaders around the world that would love nothing more than to rewrite history to their benefit, to vilify their current enemies and change how people remember the past. And these tools and techniques allow them to do that by changing the materials easily at scale, they can change how people recall it. You can look at it uh for people who were lived through those events. If you change the data, they will recall it incorrectly. Now, we should be equally clear that there are very valid use cases for rewriting history, particularly at the personal level.

Maybe someone who has had you know terrible experiences in in a relationship or friendship or a family, the dynamic, might want to remember things differently, remove triggering people or uh objects or scenes from their personal histories. That's a valid use case for the technology. There's a therapeutic use case for the technology. But as with all technology, this capability is now out in the world and it is amoral, which means it has no intrinsic morality. The technology exists, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

So, how we use the technology is contingent on the user's personal and societal moral compass. And let's face it, that's not going so well these days. So, what do we do about this? How do we prevent history from being rewritten by unscrupulous politicians and leaders or authoritarians or whoever? Well, here's the thing: it's impossible to rewrite everything.

Whenever you're out and about and you see something, even potentially marginally significant, get out your phone and take a moment to record 10 seconds of video or snap a photo and save it. Add it to the historical record as an active citizen, an active source of record, because even if you were to deploy AI agents everywhere, you can't rewrite things you don't have permission to rewrite. And so stuff stored on someone's personal device or on a backup hard drive somewhere, it's gonna be real hard to rewrite that. When we are using photo editing tools like Google Photos that can clean up a photo of distracting things that we might not want, one of the things that we have to be careful of as end users is to save the original separately, save our changes as a copy, so that we always have the original for a reference. So that if you know there's a photo of you and your your favorite pet or your favorite person, and in the background there's something, some event of significance happening, Google Photos might clean up that to give you a more satisfying photo.

But you want to save the original because if it turns out that there was something important happening in the background, you can be a part of the historical record that correctly documents it. Reality, facts, and truth have never been more fragile than they are today. So we each have to do our part in reinforcing them as much as possible by using the tools we have and using them intelligently and using them frequently to record to make history harder to edit for those who might want to tell things a certain way. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in.

Talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.