Thomas Sowell: My Experience With Artificial Intelligence
My ‘voice’ is all over the internet saying things I have never said and would never say.
By Thomas Sowell
Artificial intelligence may present many expanded opportunities for advancement in many fields. But it can also present expanded opportunities for deceptive and dangerous frauds. Here I can speak from personal experience, as a target of such frauds.
AI has created imitations of my voice, to accompany photographs of me, saying things in various parts of the internet. These include both things I have never said and things the direct opposite of what I have said.
Under current rules and practices, people can do such things anonymously. Even after the fraud has been discovered and shut down, the same anonymous people can do the same thing elsewhere on the internet.
This is not something happening uniquely to me. Another target of this particular AI fraud is military historian Victor Davis Hanson. In addition to his profound scholarly writings on military history, Prof. Hanson has also spoken out strongly on many current and controversial issues.
Apparently those who do not agree with him cannot argue effectively against what he said. So they use AI to make him seem to be saying something different.
Political or ideological reasons for creating fraudulent imitations of people on the internet are not the only reasons. Some of the creators of these deceptive imitations have things to sell or donations to seek. These are the easiest imitations to tell are not mine.
My own website—FactsAgainstRhetoric.org—sells nothing and asks for no donations. It contains not only things that I have actually said, but also a great many things that others have said—on subjects ranging from affirmative action to medical issues, education issues and geographic influences.
This is a website set up in hopes of helping young people get an education, despite being in college.
Too many of our colleges and universities today have similar ideological priorities and methods as those people who create AI frauds. Despite the presumed enlightenment goals of educational institutions, what actually happens, on too many campuses, is a stamping out of contrary opinions among students and the faculty, while invited speakers are prevented from speaking by mob disruptions and threats.
This has been done so extensively that it is possible to become “educated”—literally from kindergarten to the Ph.D.—without ever encountering a fundamentally different vision of the world. To those with the prevailing vision, it is words—not facts—that are crucial. In this context, AI frauds about words have a major role to play. So have such words as “racist” or “fascist”—used as a substitute for facts.
It is not even necessary for those with the prevailing vision to know what the words mean, or whether they fit with the existing reality. Scholars whose factual arguments have undermined some aspect of the prevailing vision have been answered by calling them “racist” or “white supremacists”—even when in fact some of them have interracial marriages.
Charlie Kirk was called a “fascist,” when in fact it would be hard to find anyone more the opposite of fascist than Charlie Kirk. But what can we expect, when our educational institutions turn out so many people utterly ignorant of basic facts and inflamed by high-sounding rhetoric?
Tragically, the AI impersonation fraud is part of a much larger and much longer lasting undermining of the very concept of truth. At one extreme are those intellectuals who speak loftily of “my truth,” as if it were private property, exempt from challenge by facts or logic. But a privately owned truth is irrelevant to communication between people.
More important are whole institutions—including education and the news media—whose basic reason for existing is to convey truth, but who cannot resist the temptation to seek power instead.
If there are no serious consequences for either individuals or institutions that create frauds—whether by AI or by silencing other viewpoints—we will have no basis for settling our inevitable differences other than violence.
And once violence takes over, it may not matter what issues set it off, as violence and counter-violence take on a life of their own. At that point, the issue is no longer which vision will win, but whether we shall survive as a free society, or survive at all.
Mr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.