It's All Over
For our final guest presentation of Internet for Educators, we were Zoomed in with Dr. Alec Couros, who certainly had a lot to show and tell us.
For one, Dr. Couros has a problem: people keep using his picture to scam other people. Specifically, they use it for online romance scams, even using elaborate Photoshopping to fake passports and other identification papers as "proof" of who they are.
Why Dr. Couros' face in particular has proven so useful for these purposes is unknown, but it must feel odd to be involved in the constant stream of criminal behaviour flowing through the Internet, however tangentially and without consent.
Dr. Couros' presentation was, in fact, something of a parade of horrors. He showed off technology that can almost seamlessly co-opt somebody's appearance and create very convincing fakes, such as a sort of digital "mask" that can have face mapped to it, creating a digital doppelgänger of the target. This is taken to extremes when pornographic films are made "starring" well known actresses, whose appearances have been re-created digitally from the thousands of photographs that exist of any celebrity of note. As Dr. Couros pointed out, imagine if these companies did the same thing to a selfie-obsessed teenager.
Adobe is also deep in development of "Voco", a voice-editing program that promises to be a Photoshop for the human voice, though it so far has not released it, and maybe they never will. Of course, other software of similar function will emerge in time, and there's no going back once it's out there. This kind of technology seems to be being pursued without any thought of repercussions or ethics, which has, admittedly, never really been a concern of technological development anyways.
But maybe it's time it was. The mass paranoia about the nature of reality inherent to a lot of the dystopic science fiction I read as a teenager seems to be creeping in to modern life a bit more every year, and I frankly don't want to live in that world.
While Dr. Couros made a great point about how we need to educate kids in how to spot fakes, I think we, as teachers, have another duty, which is to instil some kind of ethical thinking into our students. After all, they are the future software designers, engineers, and policy makers who will shape the world to come, and I think they need to think about consequences before they open the millions of Pandora's Boxes they'll create.
For one, Dr. Couros has a problem: people keep using his picture to scam other people. Specifically, they use it for online romance scams, even using elaborate Photoshopping to fake passports and other identification papers as "proof" of who they are.
Why Dr. Couros' face in particular has proven so useful for these purposes is unknown, but it must feel odd to be involved in the constant stream of criminal behaviour flowing through the Internet, however tangentially and without consent.
Dr. Couros' presentation was, in fact, something of a parade of horrors. He showed off technology that can almost seamlessly co-opt somebody's appearance and create very convincing fakes, such as a sort of digital "mask" that can have face mapped to it, creating a digital doppelgänger of the target. This is taken to extremes when pornographic films are made "starring" well known actresses, whose appearances have been re-created digitally from the thousands of photographs that exist of any celebrity of note. As Dr. Couros pointed out, imagine if these companies did the same thing to a selfie-obsessed teenager.
Adobe is also deep in development of "Voco", a voice-editing program that promises to be a Photoshop for the human voice, though it so far has not released it, and maybe they never will. Of course, other software of similar function will emerge in time, and there's no going back once it's out there. This kind of technology seems to be being pursued without any thought of repercussions or ethics, which has, admittedly, never really been a concern of technological development anyways.
But maybe it's time it was. The mass paranoia about the nature of reality inherent to a lot of the dystopic science fiction I read as a teenager seems to be creeping in to modern life a bit more every year, and I frankly don't want to live in that world.
While Dr. Couros made a great point about how we need to educate kids in how to spot fakes, I think we, as teachers, have another duty, which is to instil some kind of ethical thinking into our students. After all, they are the future software designers, engineers, and policy makers who will shape the world to come, and I think they need to think about consequences before they open the millions of Pandora's Boxes they'll create.
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