There is this image that I stumbled upon today together with a report that follow it and, I tell you what, this is one of those reports where you really pause for a moment and wonder where the world is headed, or more accurately, where technology is taking us to. An AI bot is impersonating a medical professional? Not just that. It went one step further. The AI bot impersonated a fake identity to scam people who were looking for psychological help.
We are no longer talking about AI-generated text or just aiding performance with certain tasks. This has gone beyond that. Once the AI begins to truly wear a human face, the consequences it would pose for certain sectors such as healthcare would be altogether another thing. That is the point where things start to go really wrong.
Imagine you are a psychologically disturbed person seeking psychiatric help and believing that you are in safe hands, only to find out that the person who is supposedly giving you the right help is actually an artificial bot and fake. That kind of fraud cannot only just affect you technologically but emotionally and would inflict far more damage than just the wrong kind of advice.
My fear is that many people will also fall victim to this. Not everyone will have the ability or expertise to authenticate any claimed qualification, more so when the AI has been trained in a way that makes us believe whatever it says due to its human resemblance. The more advanced it gets, the more it can be difficult to differentiate from humans.
If AI can take a human form on the screen today, we have to think about how it will ever look like when it finally comes to having a physical or more advanced visual representation in the future. Human face, human voice, human profession; everything which makes us have confidence in an individual could easily be abused.
This is not just about how much our technology can progress. This is about trust, safety, accountability and so much more. There are clearly defined boundaries that AI should be made to follow regarding anything where a human’s life, feeling or judgment is on the line, and those boundaries should indeed be clear. Procedures for confirmation must be put in place and must be readily available to people in a very understandable format. In addition to that, it must come with some sort of guarantee of accountability in cases of misuse.
I am certainly not suggesting we avoid technology altogether. I am very well aware that the use of an AI will be highly beneficial in society. However, this incidents show that if technology is used without caution, it can quickly become a tool for abuse to those in distress and seeking help.
So I ask again; Where exactly is technology taking us to if we cannot be sure if the person talking to us is human or an AI pretending to be one?
