Gary Marcus writes:

The night before I testified in the US Senate in May, 2023, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett sent me a manuscript that he called “counterfeit people”. It was published a few days later in The Atlantic.

Here the first paragraph.

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

He was right then. Three years later even more so. The need for the kind of law he was calling for – one forbidding “the creation of and ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people” is now urgent.

Two items sent to me this morning make that absolutely clear. The first (original sources apparently in this thread here) shows how far deep fake videos have come:

 

Anybody’s appearance can (given sufficient data) be faked now, at any time, for almost nothing.

Meanwhile, remember OpenClaw, and how I warned that it would cause all kinds of security risks? Well here’s a new one, you can have OpenClaw call people, and pretend to be human. [Continue reading…]