Grinch 2.0
By Gordon Hopkins
“I must find some way to stop Christmas from coming.” – The Grinch
Every week I swear to myself I’ll find something, anything, to write about other than AI (Artificial Intelligence). Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes. I try hard and, yet, anyone who has ever seen me with an ice cream sundae knows willpower is not my strong suit.
To be fair, every week, more often than that, really, I read yet another news story about some insanity brought about by this ubiquitous technology. This week was no different.
We’ve all seen the news stories about AI-generated videos featuring real people doing thing they never did. It isn’t hard at all to find videos of celebrities like Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise offering dubious investment advice.
A video of former president Barack Obama warning people not to trust everything they see on the internet turned out to be bogus. (I’m really not sure if this is ironic or not.) It was made by BuzzFeed and filmmaker Jordan Peele for the purpose of showing people not to trust everything they see on the internet.
Unsurprisingly, the current president, Donald Trump, features in more AI fakes than I could possibly catalogue, created by both supporters and opponents.
There was a story about two women who were duped into believing they were romantically involved with Keanu Reeves.
Sometimes this is about money. The two women I mentioned were collectively bilked out of more than $200,000. Sometimes it’s about propaganda. See just about anything that features current or previous presidents. For the most part, though, they seem to just be about fooling people for the sake of fooling people.
Whether the motivation is theft, propaganda, to prank someone or just to see if it can be done, the one thing all those examples I just listed are that they feature someone famous. The most recent story I came across, thee one that prompted me to write this, does not. I find that deeply concerning.
People in Grand Island were understandably upset when they saw a video of the mayor of that fair city announcing a ban on outdoor Christmas lights, “Recently, the Grand Island City Council passed a resolution to limit visible Christmas decorations to December 1 through December 31. There should be no exterior lights or tree visible through a window.”
The mayor advised the penalty for violating the resolution was pretty harsh, “Those that do not follow these guidelines will have their electric utilities suspended until January 1. Thanks in advance for your compliance, and happy holidays from the city of Grand Island.”
Obviously, this was fake. Also obvious, the mayor of Grand Island is not Keanu Reeves. How many people outside Grand Island know that Roger Steele is mayor of Grand Island. For that matter, how many in Grand Island know it?
The creator of this video has since come forward and declared it was never his intention to ruin Christmas (in case you were still wondering what the headline meant). It was just a joke, so he says. Some random guy did this not for any personal gain or to make a point, political or otherwise. He was just bored and felt like using someone else’s face and voice for a prank.
That, my friends, scares the mistletoe outta me.
