James Cameron: Skynet Would Destroy Humanity With Deepfakes, Not Nukes
If machines ever rise up to overthrow humanity, expect them to use deepfakes, not nukes, to take down our society, says James Cameron, the filmmaker behind the Terminator franchise.
“All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity,” Cameron told The BBC in an interview last week.
He brought up the topic while discussing the threat of AI-generated “deepfake” videos, which can manipulate someone’s face to say something else. Cameron fears the same technology could be abused to cause political chaos or start a war. To make his point, he referenced Skynet, the evil artificial intelligence from the Terminator franchise, which originally wipes out half of humanity through a nuclear strike.
If Skynet ever emerges in our world, Cameron thinks the evil AI could plot humanity’s downfall rather easily by creating seemingly realistic, but ultimately fake videos, to fool people into hating one another. “It would actually look a lot like what's going on right now,” he said, alluding to how disinformation and conspiracy theories can easily go viral in our digital age.
“[Skynet is] not going to have to like wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves,” he said.
Cameron isn’t alone in warning the public about deepfakes. For years, security experts and lawmakers have also sounded the alarm about AI-generated videos posing a national security threat. Cameron added that deepfakes exploit how video evidence can often convince us something is true.
“This is the great problem with us
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