Neil Diamond seemed to anticipate today’s deep-fake identity crisis more than 50 years ago, with his anthem about the futility of self-assertion, I Am... I Said.
While back then no one was listening, “not even the chair”, Denmark has finally paid attention, becoming the first country to give citizens ownership and copyright over their own identities.
It’s a milestone in the frontierland of artificial intelligence (AI) and increasing ingenuity with deep-fake depictions of real people, but it may not be terribly practical. Fakesters can easily make themselves untraceable, even while they defraud people or cause spiteful mischief by misusing someone’s image. It’s pernicious because a cohort of people will always believe that even a person as rich and famous as, say, Neil Diamond is really flogging bitcoin or advocating febrile conspiracy theories.
The eminent Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole recently had a go at figuring out how and why AI-generated profiles of him got so many things so hilariously – but potentially disastrously – wrong.
He had fathered six extra children he’d never heard about, and married “more wives than Henry VIII”, according to summaries provided by AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That was a heck of a lot of unpaid child support, not to mention divorces in a country where, for much of O’Toole’s life, divorce was almost impossible to get. Never mind the shock to his one real-life wife and two real-life sons.
At least when fraudsters make free with someone’s identity, their purpose is generally clear: money or trouble. With AI, it’s just a free-range version of Douglas Adams’s “random improbability generator” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – except that AI strives for probability at the expense of actuality.
It turned out that AI had apportioned O’Toole some of the late actor Peter O’Toole’s biography, including his one-time wife, the actress Siân Phillips, and their two children, and a subsequent girlfriend and her child.
Disappointingly, the young Fintan did not also star in Lawrence of Arabia or play poker with Omar Sharif.
AI also took his real wife’s occupation as a teacher in a Catholic school when they married in the 80s and came up with another teacher altogether. Imagine if the nuns had found out!
It also gave him two wives named Dervla (the real one and an entirely innocent party) and both a wife and a daughter named Aoife.
It named four of his extra children but he may never know the names of the other two. Aoife and Dervla, perhaps.
Altogether, aside from a couple of tangential professional links or name confusions, the AI fairies made up O’Toole’s life from a fact salad of other people’s bits and pieces. It had the data to divine that Peter and Fintan were unrelated, but unaccountably did not.
As O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times, AI was scarily unable to distinguish between genuine connections and those which it knew to be false, seemingly programmed to “puke up” information regardless.
He conceded that with more data and parameters it could become more accurate – except that it has now infected itself with so much of its own bogus data.
“Since ChatGPT will also steal this column, everything I’ve written ironically in these opening paragraphs will now loop back into its ravenous maw as verified truth.”
We may now all be saddled with involuntary “second life” online selves with ever-morphing pasts. A few more reticulations of AI-style probability and Fintan O’Toole will have been a leading New Zealand Trade Union leader (à la Fintan Patrick Walsh).
In fairness, O’Toole did call his last book We Don’t know Ourselves.
Unless, of course, it turns out that Peter O’Toole really wrote it.
