Pandora, Chicken Little and messages for today’s world

Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias conducted a press conference Wednesday that is frightening enough on its own. Its broader implications are an even greater cause to sound warnings about we see, hear and read.

It was, coincidentally, a vivid example of a warning an expert on artificial intelligence shared with our newsroom staff at a workshop only a day before. The expert — Mike Reilley from Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Accelerator Program — included a meme with a haunting message.

“Remember,” Homer Simpson tells son Bart, “this is the least scary it will ever be.”

In other words, the scams Giannoulias warned against are only going to become more numerous and more sophisticated as artificial intelligence tools expand, and as Reilley described in his program, they already have a reach that extends into almost every facet of modern life.

Giannoulias’ presentation, reported by Assistant Managing Editor Charles Keeshan online and in today’s Cops & Crime column, involved fraudulent texts being sent to random recipients warning them of dire consequences for unpaid traffic, toll or parking violations and referring them to online links or QR codes that supposedly can allow them to settle their debt. And, the secretary’s warning echoed Homer Simpson.

“These fraudulent texts look more and more official every day,” Giannoulias said.

That progression was a fundamental theme of Reilley’s program.

“One thing to remember with AI images, video and audio — even though we can spot with our own two eyes, some of the deepfakes now, remember that AI is running 24-7-365,” Reilley said. “It’s improving day and night, so if we’re out having a beer watching basketball games, it’s learning how to make better video and audio.”

Such warnings ought naturally to get our attention, but they just as naturally lead to questions about what can and should we do. In my mind, they blend into an intriguing mix of the Pandora’s Box and Chicken Little stories. The AI boogeyman has been let out into cyberspace, and we can’t make it go away. And, although there is legitimate cause for alarm in the “sky is falling” tone of warnings about the negative implications of artificial intelligence tools, there also are things that can be done to control them while using the positive qualities for the betterment of society.

Some of these responses will surely be legislative. Some, like the landmark jury finding against Meta and other services this week, will be addressed in civil courts. Some will be found in a growing number of online tools being developed to help responsible news organizations and skeptical consumers of information verify or debunk things they encounter.

All of them, though, emphasize the increasing burden on all of us as individuals to read, watch and listen critically. I often describe this objective in terms of using a diverse range of sources to help monitor and counteract the natural biases inherent in media sources. But it is also growing clearer every hour that the nature of trust is gaining new dimensions. It’s not just a matter anymore of identifying whether information sources are slanting what they report. It’s also a matter of questioning the very pictures, text and video that purport to describe events.

A recent Department of Homeland Security report opens with a particularly valuable insight into the challenge.

“The threat … comes not from the technology used to create (fraud),” the report states, “but from people’s natural inclination to believe what they see, and as a result deepfakes and synthetic media do not need to be particularly advanced or believable in order to be effective in spreading mis/disinformation.”

Recognizing that inclination, here’s one more piece of advice to remember in the AI world we’re living in today: An old saw says trust is earned, and that is true enough. But it is also true that trust is given. Don’t give yours until you’re sure it has been earned.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World” has been named a Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association and is available at eckhartzpress.com.