AI scams are everywhere — and they’re slick. Here’s how to protect yourself and your family.
Vox · Adam Clark Estes ·
I was worried about my boomer parents. Turns out, everyone is an easy mark these days.
It’s hard to tell exactly when AI slop stopped being just a punchline involving Will Smith eating spaghetti and started feeling dangerous. That’s actually part of the problem.
This year, many of the popular AI tools that used to struggle with the number of fingers on a human hand gained the ability to generate photorealistic video — with audio — that costs users virtually nothing to create. Even trained scientists can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s machine-made in digital form. But the most insidious applications of this remarkable technology are playing out on a much more personal level.
A few years ago, we started to hear more about voice cloning tools, which allow scammers to spoof a loved one’s voice in order to extort money from a victim. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have also made any text-based scams more convincing and much cheaper to deploy. Imposter scams, which include romance scams, tech support fraud, and employment fraud, are on the rise, and thanks to increasingly high-quality AI, it’s harder than ever to know who’s real and who’s an imposter online.