How AI Could Pose a Threat in the Outdoors

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THE EMERGENCE OF of artificial intelligence holds great promise to both improve outdoor recreation and to disrupt it with equal efficacy.

Essentially, AI is ramped-up VR, virtual reality, that erases the critically important line between what’s real and what’s not. 

In our day-to-day lives, AI already is being used for less than noble purposes. Parents are receiving calls believed to be from their children in which a voice identical to that of their child says he or she is in trouble and needs money sent immediately. Banks are being scammed by artificial voices, cloned to sound like yours or mine, instructing the bank to move huge sums of money to places where it can never be recovered.

Equally wrong-minded people also, certainly, are cooking up schemes in which AI could be used to threaten outdoor recreation. And unless countermeasures are developed first, here are a few ways that could happen.

In tournament fishing, some events have taken to using photographs or video as official verification of catches. Fish are weighed or measured on camera then promptly released, and that’s an idea I wholeheartedly embrace. No long trips in livewells, no release into unfamiliar water. And it’s all based on the notion that pictures don’t lie. And they didn’t, until now.

If someone has the sophistication and software onboard to do so, that someone could create an image or video of themselves catching and weighing just about any size fish of any species necessary to win a tournament by an ounce or a pound or an inch or a foot. And the technology to do so already is crisp enough to produce images virtually undetectable indistinguishable from actual photos or videos.

That is real. That already is possible. 

On the artificial-voice scene, imagine a tournament director getting a call from your best friend to say that you – his best friend – is cheating in tournaments. Only it wasn’t your friend who made the call. It was a rival who happened to grab a voice sample and used AI to put fake words into your friend’s mouth. 

The blurring of the line between real and unreal in the outdoors isn’t new. It started long ago, when people would cut photographs of big deer or big fish out of magazines and place them in advertisements for their own businesses. The question then was whether the deer on a particular ranch really were that big or the photo came from somewhere else. At least, though, we all could safely presume that the photograph, wherever taken, was of a real animal.

Selling points are important to folks who sell things, too, so it’s not surprising that some sellers would try to make their product look better than it actually does. For reference, watch most any fast-food restaurant commercial on television.

I mentioned AI on my radio show on the final Saturday of April and learned during the next break that my own producer, Adam Snydar, had experienced AI fraud.

He’s young and still lives with his parents. And one night, someone using AI to clone his voice called and told his mother that he’d been wrongly arrested and needed several hundred dollars sent right away to avoid being jailed. 

The only reason his mother didn’t take the bait was that she knew Adam was asleep upstairs, in the same house.

To put this in a criminally profitable outdoors perspective, imagine getting a call from your best beachfront-wading friend late on a Saturday afternoon. 

“Hey, man, I got my truck stuck on the beach, and this wrecker driver isn’t going to pull me out unless I can get somebody to send him a hundred bucks pronto. He won’t take my credit card. Can you help me out? Phone’s about to die. Use that payment app we use and send the money to Joe’s Tow-and-Go. Thanks, Bro.”

Would you send the money? I’d call first, but if I got any reply other than a live answer, I’d be really tempted to send that $100, even if that meant me losing the money to a crook. Better than leaving a friend stranded, right? And then again potentially so wrong.

There are good minds in this world who will find ways to benefit mankind through the possibilities and potential of AI. But for each of them, there’s also an opportunistic, predatory criminal who will search out ways to exploit AI for personal gain.

The one thing AI can never replace is the opportunity each of us has to share outdoor experiences with friends and family members. Not on a screen, but in front of our eyes. Under our noses. Across our lips. On our fingertips. 

Those interactions, at least for now, are irreplaceable. And if there comes a time when our own senses can be replaced or in any way substituted, the best I can hope is that we be treated to the sight of sunrises, the smell of trout slicks and the feeling of warm sunlight on a cold neck in a deer blind.

Editor’s Note: In case you blew past it, the Inside Fish & Game column also addresses artificial intelligence, on page 4 of this issue.

 

Email Doug Pike at ContactUs@fishgame.com

 

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