Fake content is becoming harder to ignore. This Canadian Nobel Prize winner has an idea to help
Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says it's getting harder to decipher videos, voices and images produced by virtual reality technology – but he has an idea to help the war.
The extended struggle has contributed to a shift in how the British-Canadian computer scientist and recent Nobel Prize recipient thinks the world can deal with fake content.
“For a while, I thought we could label things as produced by AI,” Hinton said Monday at the inaugural Hinton Lectures.
“I think it makes a lot more sense now to be able to see that things are real by taking code from them and going to other websites and seeing the same things on that website.”
Hinton spoke at the first two-night event of the Hinton Lectures at the Global Risk Institute, which took place this week at the John WH Bassett Theater in Toronto.
Hinton, often referred to as the goddess of AI, briefly took the stage to remind the audience of a series of dangers she has been warning the public about with the technology. He feels that AI can create or contribute to natural disasters, unemployment, cybercrime, discrimination and biological and existential threats.
He said the labeling system would ensure that the content is not fake and he thinks it could be very useful when it comes to political video ads.
“You can have something like a QR code on them [taking you] on a website, and if there's a similar video on that website, all you have to do is know that that website is real,” Hinton explained.
Most Canadians have seen deepfakes online and nearly a quarter encounter them every week, according to an April survey of 2,501 Canadians by Dais, a public policy organization at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Deepfakes are digitally altered photos or videos that show scenes that never happened. Recent deepfakes have shown Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket and pop star Taylor Swift in sexually revealing poses.
At a press conference after the event, Hinton shared more about what he did with his share of the $1.45 million he and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield received when they won the Nobel Prize in physics earlier this month.
Hinton said he donated part of his share of the prize to the organization Water First, Creemore, Ont., which trains aboriginal communities on how to improve and provide access to safe water systems.
He first thought about giving some of the money to the water agency actor Matt Damon is working with in Africa, but then his partner asked him: “What about Canada?”
This year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics is Geoffrey Hinton, a British Canadian known as the 'Goddess of AI.' He talks to CBC senior political correspondent Rosemary Barton about how governments should regulate technology and its use in election campaigns.
That led Hinton to discover Water First. He said he was forced to donate to it because of the approval of the world he feels when many events start.
“I think it's great that they see it [who lived on the land first]but it doesn't stop indigenous children from having diarrhoea,” he said.
Hinton previously said some of his winnings will be re-directed to an organization that provides jobs to a variety of youth.
'Anxious person'
A large part of the evening even on Monday was devoted to a speech from Jacob Steinhardt, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and mathematics at UC Berkeley in California.
Steinhardt told the audience that he believes AI will advance faster than many expect, but there will be surprises along the way.
By 2030, he thinks AI will be “superhuman,” when it comes to math, programming and hacking.
And he thinks that large-scale linguistic models, which underpin AI systems, may be able to persuade or manipulate.
“There is significant headroom, if someone were to try to train [them] to convince, perhaps an unscrupulous company or a government that cares about persuading its citizens,” said Steinhardt.
He told the audience that he considers himself a “worrier,” who believes there is a 10 percent chance that technology will lead to extinction and a 50 percent chance that it will create massive economic value and “great prosperity.”
Asked at a recent news conference about Steinhardt's “worried” label, Hinton calls herself “a troubled person”.
“There's research that shows that when you ask people to estimate risk, normal, healthy people underestimate the risk of really bad things … and the people who get the risks right are the ones who are less stressed,” Hinton said.
“I think of myself as one of those, and I think the risk is higher than Jacob [Steinhardt] you think – let's say about 20 percent.”
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