AInonymity

I don't usually write posts like these but saw a recent video that I found interesting in terms of human behaviour and what could eventually affect Hive with the freedom's it brings people and those abusing them.

This story, and I'll link the full video about it at the end of the post, revolves around the emergent technology of AI, particularly deep fakes, anonymity and freedom to transact and use social platforms behind the security of their encryptions, and lastly what I assume started as a way to make money but ended up become much more evil.

I'll be tagging this post as #nsfw as the content can be quite distasteful but I won't be including any graphics at all aside from the youtube video discussing it in further detail.

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The rise of AI chat bots and photo and video manipulation with the help of it has risen in the last few years. It's something photographers and content creators are starting to take somewhat serious with brands suggesting to verify photos as they are created and posted to leave a digital footprint similar to what metadata does these days to confirm it is a real photo compared to an edited one. Naturally blockchain solutions come to mind and I think it could be something Hive could be a good testing ground for since we have a lot of photographers here, but the base idea of it is that it's by default implemented onto physical cameras before they're uploaded.

With AI improving on a regular basis, editing pictures has become not only easier but also giving off better results to the point where you'd have a hard time noticing a difference with the naked eye.

The basis of what occurred recently involved deep fakes, crypto payments and telegram communications. Some countries were affected by it more than others, in the video they primarily discuss South Korea but they mention that it has occurred in the States as well and I assume other places to but potentially to a smaller degree. Some believe that this is partly also what caused the detainment of Telegrams CEO Pavel Durov to a degree as it involved CP, whether real or not which is a very serious offense and the CEO has recently pushed for Telegram features to combat this which is weird that he had to be attained before he considered this implementation.

This case has become so big that it's pushing people in SK to delete all their images in their online social circles to prevent becoming victims.

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I'm not sure how it originally started, could've been someone just wanting to make a quick buck. Many of these telegram groups are reported to not have any human activity in the chats at all, just a bot offering image manipulation for payment. "Buy 10 gems for x crypto and get 10 images deep faked" was the general ask with bots then taking care of the payment, the manipulation and handing users the final images all privately through DM's. These chatrooms, although no real human conversations were happening in them had up to 260k users in it.

Eventually more rooms started popping up with a more segregated focus on specific zones or schools. They asked for images, as many as possible of a certain person and as much information as you can share.

This data is of course not hard to obtain in this day and age, you can take your general influencer who are the most affected by this and you won't find it difficult to collect 10 images of them to feed an AI deep fake bot so the end result can be as "good" as possible. If you've read about how AI works, it requires machine learning doing repetitive tasks until they find a solution/figure out the best way to do something which requires a lot of input. The same was requested here, give us as many images as you can of a certain person, doesn't matter who, and we'll give you the best deep fake results in exchange.

You may start to wonder why they would want more information, that's where the evil started to sprout. It wasn't enough that the potential first use case of this was to sexualize a crush of yours, they had to go further as humans like to do, especially when there are no consequences. This was also easy to do, a certain disturbed or experimental person could easily upload up to 10 images of anyone onto this service and produce illicit content of them so everyone became affected, not only influencers.

This weird "pandemic" started where databases were being filled with regular photos of regular people including their information along with now sexual content with their faces on them. A lot of cases where regular Joe's, someone's boyfriend, someone's brother, etc, that were busted owning images on their phones of someone they know all deepfaked in very disturbing outcomes.

Apparently in SK this was abused to the max. People started sharing these deepfaked images around to the point where even teachers would find images online of themselves deepfaked. It caused quite an uproar as you can imagine between people not too fond or not as tech-savvy as others not even aware of AI and deepfakes coming across such manipulations of their loved ones. The victims as may be quite obvious were mostly females and the assumption was that perpetrators were mostly male.

What started as a way to maybe make a quick buck quickly resulted in a weird collective of "revengeporn" or other disgusting behaviour that affected many. Someone reported that up to 7% of South Korea's schools were affected where they found databases with people's information and deep fakes. Meaning that for the victim's, even if you had never done anything wrong you could be on that list because someone who went to that school or knew you in some way had uploaded images and your public information to this database which resulted in deepfakes of you existing and being shared around.

Naturally not everyone would share these images around, I assume it started off with the "edgy" kids and many potentially keeping a low profile assisting this activity just to see the reactions of the victims, etc. It's quite a weird thought to imagine that regular people were becoming victims of this and someone getting off on seeing you and others around you suffer because of the results.

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Needless to be said, no one was under any protection, no matter the gender or age. While reports were coming in to police stations most of them couldn't do anything because it was occurring on "Telegram servers" which aren't located in SK. This may be something that ultimately lead to the detainment of Telegram's CEO in France.

Anyway, what can be said about this whole ordeal in terms of Hive and its freedoms. We know some things:

Creating a Hive account can be done anonymously and under the protection of VPN. This means you can use front-ends that won't be able to tell your location.

You can use hive to organize/discuss such activities which cannot be censored.

What is important to remember, though, which newcomers may not know, is that images and videos can't be uploaded to Hive, only text. Even in the instances of where text is illicit, front-ends can block this text from view but it always remains on the blockchain.

With this technology become more popular, there could be instances of decentralized image and video options existing as well that can't be taken down. I believe platforms like 3speak are working towards this but needless to say they're going to need some kind of governance system that takes care of illegal content such as mentioned above. While it's great that we can opt-in for certain freedoms other social platforms or governments would want to ban due to corruption/manipulation, there should be no room for content everyone agrees doesn't belong here.

Lastly, we have many unique stakeholders of all sizes and they all can combat this kind of activity from being rewarded through our downvote system. I believe this one would work quite well. Eventually if payments occur and these activities get funded in some way, it's up to exchanges and the "other end" to hold the people behind these accounts accountable. Our currency isn't private in the way others are like Monero, everyone can see everyone's balances and where they send them to so it's up to others to then make sure these people get found when they're trying to move money around.

It is worth noting though that platforms like Hive will most likely "welcome" this kind of activity due to the way it works by default. If there's anything we've learned from this technology is that bad actors will always ab/use it if they can and a majority of early activity revolves around that, same thing occurred with Bitcoin early on when it was mostly used for Drugs and Gambling. Luckily we haven't seen much of such activity on Hive compared to say Tron where it's all just gambling apps, etc. Maybe it's some of the blessings of being small, still, or just knowing that the community doesn't stand for that and strives to reward good activity that moves us forward as a human species.

Either way, just wanted to share this story as I found it quite interested and found a new channel to subscribe that seems to discuss similarly interesting stories of what's occurring in the world. Hope it wasn't too much negativity all at once. I guess we can hope that with the CEO's detainment and Telegram coin taking a dump it means it wasn't as encrypted as people thought and hopefully some of that evil activity that occurred will be brought to justice with the users being found out.

Here's the video in question: