The ability to scam people exists and isn't going away. People went town to town in covered wagons selling bullshit. People scammed others out of money centuries before that.
The answer isn't pearl-clutching nonsense about how this technology is so different and so morally reprehensible compared to everything else. The answer is education. If someone shows up at your door and sells you a bottle of water that will cure all your ills for $100 then skips town, most people would see it as your fault for being so gullible. Someday there will be some technological or social way to easily differentiate deep fakes from real video the same way you can with photoshopped images today.
All previous scams relied on con artists using various means to pretend to either be trustworthy in their own right despite being strangers or as representing some trustworthy institution. But having people being able to act as your family members is a whole other issue. You can't claim that this is no different from other scams.
These calls usually are made from prison, with an outside accomplice. They are rarely caught.
People are sleepy, and concerned, and swear the voice they heard was the one of their child.
Another no-ai popular scam is done by stealing a WhatsApp account (e.g. by cloning the sim), and then contacting a friend or relative asking for a quick cash transfer for something urgent, to be returned the next day.
Deepfakes might make these scams more believable, but the core causes of the issue and the solutions have not changed.
True, but giving the scammers orders-of-magnitude better tools can have serious consequences. If you already have a plague of robbers in your town, handing out free automatic handguns and ammo to anyone is beyond stupid. Yet this is pretty much what these AI tools give to scammers.
Arguing that people will eventually figure it out is no justification for allowing it. It ignores all the casualties in the meantime. This is especially bad because the result of this scale of weaponized technology may well be a complete destruction of trust in society, or in technology in general. These are catastrophic for everyone in society and the economy.
This is the stock answer used for deflection in way too many scenarios. We've seen how it doesn't work.
The complete lack of an enforced ethics code in our field is the biggest blight on our combined contribution to society.
