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Who is behind the most notorious “deepfake” app on the internet? Trying to answer that question these past few months, for a new Guardian podcast series, Black Box, has been like wandering through a hall of mirrors.
The app, ClothOff, has hundreds of thousands of followers and has already been used in a least two cases to generate dozens of images of underage girls – pictures that have left the girls traumatised, their parents outraged and the police baffled at how to stop it.
Producers Josh Kelly, Alex Atack and I have followed ClothOff’s trail to nondescript addresses in central London that appear to be unoccupied. We have encountered sham businesses, distorted voices and photographs of fake employees.
It has been a frightening insight into the future we are all careering towards: in the age of artificial intelligence, is anything we see or hear on a screen real?
The hunt for ClothOff is just one of the stories we are telling about the time we are living through: the first years when AI is beginning to infiltrate our lives, but not yet so deeply that we can no longer remember life before.
We wanted to take a snapshot of this moment, to examine the impact AI is already having on the world and look for clues about what’s in store. We’ve met the scientist who pioneered AI software, before dramatically turning against it last year. We’ve listened to people reminisce about their first dates with their boyfriend (a chatbot on their smartphone) and heard of their heartbreak after a system update turns that same lover cold.
We’ve heard about the prospects of an AI system that can spot cancer years before doctors and machines that provide desperate people with something no person is giving them: humanity.
Everywhere we went, we ran into an even bigger mystery: the people using AI. Time and again, what has captivated us is not just the technology, but the way it is already reshaping what it means to be human in a series about artificial intelligence that’s really a series about us.
Michael Safi
Presenter, Today in Focus
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