Damn it, Jim...I'm a Doctor, not a writer! Dr. McCoy could have said that, but he didn't: I did, and the Jim isn't Cap't. Kirk, he's RnD.

Jim suggested I do an article about deepfakes (per Merriam Webster: an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said). I decided to expand on that to include the pluses and minuses (the good and bad, if you will) of AI...even to the good, the bad and the ugly of it, to steal that movie title.

So, let's first define what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is. More or less, it's the result of the technology created to allow computers to function intelligently, to get to correct results faster than humans can, or as a system to interpret data and to apply it to solutions or goals defined by a human deploying that system.

The first thing to pop into one's mind might be the Terminator, which would be the bad/ugly (which turned into the good). So, instead of that, lets talk about the good initially.

Well, I naturally think of AI's use in medicine, to derive new antibiotics and drugs from large data sets, to suggest drug structures or existing drugs used for other purposes to be tried for non-FDA approved uses, to diagnose diseases (and AI has exceeded Radiologists in early detection of lung cancer) and find the causes of old diseases and new ones. IBM' s Watson helped with diagnosis decades ago. But there's so much more...increasing efficiency in office management, drug delivery to remote areas, etc.

There are now uses for AI in search engines (Bing and Google...both having errors, btw), in the creation of art by keyboard - language input, automated vehicles, playing games (chess and Go), online assistants (Siri), filtering spam in your email (but...only we Mods do it at SD/WC ), predicting flight delays, pollution spread, disease spread...etc.

There are ways it can be misused, as well.

That brings us to the negative. 

Here's a small laundry list garnered from a bunch of different articles: AI phishing, or creating fake emails, websites, and links to steal information. Faster, more efficient hacking by AI, through the automated discovery of vulnerabilities in software. Deceiving critical AI controlled systems by taking advantage of the flaws in how AI sees and interprets the world through the internet, radar, etc. systems. Automating terrorism and blackmail by using commercial drones or autonomous vehicles as weapons and the misuse of AI controlled military systems and by engineering ransomware. Slaved computer swarms or even "smart" household appliances used by AI bots trying to achieve the same goal (for example, DNS attacks). Remote AI attacks, since autonomous robots wouldn’t need to be controlled within any set distance by pilotless aircraft, deceived by false navigation information for example, or by satellites. Propaganda, through easily-generated fake images and video (deepfakes). Automated dissent removal, by automatically finding and removing text or images disagreeing with a given opinion (AI censorship). Finally, personalized persuasion, taking advantage of publicly available information, or disinformation to target someone’s opinions, or whole demographics' opinions (i.e. regular commercial advertising, or election advertising).

There really are incredibly many possible misusages of AI, and they're being done all the time but, there are good uses, being employed as well.

So, to come full circle, if you'd like to make a deepfake audio for free (one month free, that is, then subscription) give this URL a spin. You'll have to teach the machine, but isn't that what this article's all about? And no, this is not spam, any more than midjourney-4's link is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JruKb-Zeze8&t=47s and listen to Unmesh Dinda (my Photoshop guru) talk about it. 

I hope really this wasn't too heavy or depressing, folks. Enjoy your weekend.