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Everyone who has watched The Terminator movies has held a healthy skepticism of artificial intelligence, a cynical attitude further entrenched via The Matrix. In recent years, movies like Megan and Afraid have further showed the potentially perilous pitfalls of revolving our lives around computers.
The screens damage our eyesight, but AI can destroy everything when that power is put into the wrong hands. Officials in north Georgia are learning just how easy it is to victimize people, especially children, through the illegal and unethical use of AI.
One of the Cherokee Scout’s affiliated newspapers, the Times-Courier in Ellijay, Ga., shared just such a story in the Feb. 5 edition. The Gilmer County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a child pornography case where the suspect allegedly used artificial intelligence to alter images of students to be sexually explicit.
Ronald Richardson, a vendor working at Gilmer High School, has been charged with multiple counts of sexual exploitation of children. Sheriff Stacy Nicholson said he could be charged with more than 60 counts as more victims are identified.
Nicholson said that on Dec. 3, a student told Gilmer High’s school resource officer that Richardson asked her to send him photos through a social media app. The student said she communicated with Richardson often over the last year while he refilled campus vending machines, but this was the first time he asked her to send photos.
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The sheriff’s office Criminal Investigations Division discovered that all of the sexually explicit images of minors were originally normal photos downloaded from social media. Richardson is accused of using AI to make the children appear fully naked, a shocking breach of privacy that is quickly becoming a problem worldwide.
“This is the first case in which artificial intelligence has factored into an investigation like this for the Gilmer sheriff’s office,” Nicholson said. “Unfortunately, I doubt it will be the last.”
He warned that with people putting so much of their personal information on social media, and the rapidly increasing capabilities of AI, who knows what “devious minds” will do in the future. The sheriff is not being paranoid in the least; AI isn’t just coming for your job – it may also be coming for your family.
Gilmer County Schools Superintendent Brian Ridley said Richardson was employed by Pepsi to service vending machines, which he had been doing at the high school for a while. When vendors work on school campuses, they are typically run through a sex offender database and background check.
“We’re going to allow law enforcement to complete their investigation, and if there are insights that we can use to make our school safer, we’ll make those changes,” Ridley said when asked if this situation will impact how they hire vendors in the future.
To be fair, AI does hold the potential for many great things that could help the human race, particularly in areas like health care and scientific discovery, and now that this genie is out there’s no putting it back in the bottle. However, the dangers are so great that the longer we go without some kind of regulation, the closer humanity may be getting to not having a real way out.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email dbrown@cherokeescout.com.