On the Internet Nobody Knows You Are a Dog

Bitcoin.com: A set of hackers managed to impersonate Binance chief communications officer (CCO) Patrick Hillmann in a series of video calls with several representatives of cryptocurrency projects. The attackers used what Hillman described as an AI hologram, a deepfake of his image for this objective, and managed to fool some representatives of these projects, making them think Hillmann was helping them get listed on the exchange.

It’s wild how good fake and synthetic video are becoming. Synthesia, for example, uses synthetic AI video instead of actors for training videos and similar–see the example below. Tyler and I could write econ scripts and then use AIs to create video–much cheaper and less time consuming than hiring a video director. Presumably, we could even create synthetic AIs in our own image.

Notice also that Synthesia reads text but could presumably also repeat text that it hears. Thus, the future of Zoom meetings is avatars. Fake faces on fake backgrounds. Choose your race, gender, age, species and so forth. No discrimination possible! Some people won’t be happy.