How will we prevent ai-based forgery?

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Recent developments in artificial intelligence point to an age where forgery of documents, pictures, audio recordings, videos and online identities will occur with unprecedented ease. AI is poised to make high-fidelity forgery inexpensive and automated, leading to potentially disastrous consequences.

Automated forgery is already prevalent on social media, as we witnessed during the 2016 US elections. twitter has uncovered tens of thousands of automated accounts linked to Russia in the months preceding the 2016 election, according to The Washington Post. Facebook estimated that fake news spread by Russian-backed bots from January 2015 to August 2017 reached potentially half of the 250 million Americans who are eligible to vote.

When attempting to decide whether an item is genuine, it’s natural to consider its source. Yet it turns out that a web site, an email address and even the origin of a phone call can be easily faked or “spoofed.”

On the Internet, we rely on digital signatures. A digital signature is a computer method (based on cryptography) of ensuring that an item wasn’t tampered with after it was signed. Automated messages between web sites can also be authenticated by digital signatures, but digital signatures are not widely used to certify the authorship of e-mails, social-media posts, images, videos, etc.

the specter of AI forgery means we need to act to make digital signatures de rigueur as a means of authentication of digital content. First, we need to certify signatures, which can be done by central authorities, or via more democratic computer methods such as encryption and blockchain. Second, we need to make the acts of signing and verifying signatures as seamless as possible. Signing should be enabled by default in our e-mail software, word processor, smartphone cameras and in any production of digital content. Our browsers, social-media applications and other mediareading software should highlight whether content is signed, and by whom. Finally, and perhaps most challenging, we need to promulgate the norm that any item that isn’t signed is potentially forged.

Oren Etzioni is the chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at the University of Washington.

It’s a familiar scenario: A service provider fails to live up to your expectations and you feel some restitution may be in order.

Yet when you call customer service to voice a complaint, you’re faced with an automated voice menu, put on hold or told that the agent is not authorized to refund your money.

There’s some evidence that customer queues may be unavoidable at times. Caller complaints tend

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to arrive randomly, making it impossible to staff agents to handle unpredictable fluctuations in call volume. But our research suggests that some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers, even if it were operationally costless not to.

We examined the incentive structures within customer service departments at over a dozen companies in finance, technology and travel services. We found that these companies screen complaining callers by using a hierarchical organizational structure. By forcing customers to jump through hoops, the organization helps curb its redress payouts. We found that most involve at least two levels of agents.

For example, one Indian call center forbade Level 1 agents from offering any monetary refunds. These agents could only offer replacement items or provide information on the status of an order. Any caller insisting on a refund was told to call the US headquarters during normal business hours, generating additional tasks for any customer seeking more compensation from the call center manager, or Level 2 agent. This design relies on the fact that some consumers are not willing to incur this hassle. When this happens, the company is off the hook for the additional payout.

So what about the idea that frustrating customers has consequences on customer retention and long-term reputation? Some companies have little regard for their reputation, especially those who control a large market share. Unfortunately, this means companies with few competitors may find it worthwhile to alienate angry customers in order to save on Monday, March 11, 2019 E1 redress costs.

Of course there may be other advantages to a hierarchical structure. But overall, our research shows that the benefit of curbing redress costs can explain the widespread use of hierarchical call centers at many customer service departments. This may help us understand why some of the most hated companies in America are so profitable, and why customer service, unfortunately, remains so frustrating.

Anthony Dukes is an associate professor at the University of Southern California. Yi Zhu is an assistant professor and Mary & Jim Lawrence fellow at the University of Minnesota.