An Anti-AI Wearable for Our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future – Popular Mechanics

The year is 2042. You blink on your heads-up display that appears everywhere you go, and turn your eyes toward a news video that keeps annoyingly popping up in the corner. It's apparently a huge political gaffe caught on tape. But before you can angrily respond, you feel a cooling sensation on the back of your neck. It's your Anti AI AI, warning you that this videoas real as it lookswasn't taken from an actual event. It's a simulation, created using super-advanced AI that can mimic a human's voice and facial movements.

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"FAKE," you blink out into the comments section.

This future may seems improbable right now, but some of the technology that would allow such simulacra of life already exists. Neural networks are capable of creating convincing sounding replicas of human speech, like this robot Barack Obama.

Combine this with real-time motion capture that makes famous faces look like they're saying different words, and you have all the needed ingredients for spreading misinformation.

To combat this future confusion, DT R&D, a research and development arm of the Australian creative technology agency DT, created a device they call Anti AI AI, a wearable that sits on your ear like a Bluetooth device and contains a neural network trained to tell the difference between human speech and robot speech. The wearable, hooked up to a small thermoelectric plate, cools the back of your neck when it senses a robotic voice. Ironically, the device uses its own AI to foil the robots it encounters in the wild. The wearable is hooked up to an iOS app that uses a Tensorflow neural network that's been trained with thousands of samples of real voices versus robotic voices. The war between the good AIs and bad AIs is already beginning.

"One improvement would be to continually improve the network based on new input it receives 'in the wild', but that was a little beyond our five-day timeframe," the creators wrote in a blog post.

The Anti AI AI is just a prototype, but as we journey farther into the future of fake news, tools like this are going to be necessary to sift through the increasingly untrustworthy world.

Source: DT R&D

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An Anti-AI Wearable for Our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future - Popular Mechanics