Artificial Intelligence or AI has become a huge buzzword in the past ten years and rightfully so. We’re old enough here at the Bucket to remember back in the ’80s when AI first came into the national consciousness and the media overreacted as they usually do and predicted the end of civilization. Stephen Hawking even warned about it, but then again he’s predicted a race of superhumans and possibly aliens taking over earth. Well, AI has finally arrived and it may very well be as dangerous as everyone predicted it would.
AI deepfake videos have become prevalent in the last five years and the results are astounding. Not only are they of good quality, they can actually fool people into believing what they are seeing is real and not fake. Jimmy Kimmel is well known for having deepfake videos on his show, especially featuring TFG, but he promotes them as such. There are other shows and websites that announce that the videos or images are faked and not to be taken seriously. Jabari Jones YouTube site is a good example. But it becomes incredibly dangerous especially when you consider all the malicious agents around the world, like Vladimir Putin, who would like nothing more than a video surfacing where Joe Biden, Barack Obama or other prominent Democrats say disparaging remarks about certain Americans or other countries.
There are also AI image generator sites like img2go where you can create realistic looking images for free. We tried it out and made our photo-toon for today with the prompt ‘homeless Donald Trump begging for money’. The result was surprisingly good. We’ve obviously photo-shopped some items, but the look on the homeless man’s face is authentic (authentic for a fake image, that is ). We couldn’t have come up with a better reaction to Trump’s grifting. We people who despise the orange, megalomaniac man child have had that ‘just shoot me’ look for the past nine years. We just may use AI more in our photo-toons in the future.