As A.I. Systems Evolve, So Does Its Criminal Potential John Markoff - The New York Times
go to original November 15, 2016

What is Artificial Intelligence Exactly? (ColdFusion)

Imagine receiving a phone call from your aging mother seeking your help because she has forgotten her banking password.

Except it’s not your mother. The voice on the other end of the phone call just sounds deceptively like her.

It is actually a computer-synthesized voice, a tour-de-force of artificial intelligence technology that has been crafted to make it possible for someone to masquerade via the telephone.

Such a situation is still science fiction — but just barely. It is also the future of crime.

The software components necessary to make such masking technology widely accessible are advancing rapidly. Recently, for example, DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary known for a program that has bested some of the top human players in the board game Go, announced that it had designed a program that “mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing text-to-speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50 percent.”

The irony, of course, is that this year the computer security industry, with $75 billion in annual revenue, has started to talk about how machine learning and pattern recognition techniques will improve the woeful state of computer security.

But there is a downside.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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