Does Detecting AI Content Matter?

With the growing use of AI in various industries, one area that raises significant concerns is content creation.

AI tools have enabled people to generate realistic text, images, and videos with little to no effort. While this automation is a source of great convenience, it raises significant concerns about the authenticity, integrity, and ethical use of such content.

As AI-generated content becomes increasingly widespread, detecting it becomes crucial to avoid ethical, integral, and moral violations.

In this article, we dive into why detecting AI content matters and also the consequences of using AI tools unchecked.

Why Detect AI in Text?

The writing sphere extends vastly from students’ assignments to blog posts on an excess of topics, making it a relatively crucial job.

Just think about it; every piece of writing is initially an empty space, which is then filled up with meaningful words, drawing from and conveying to its readers all that has been thought, researched, studied, learned, or experienced.

But AI tools have shaken this sphere, allowing people to churn out writing pieces with merely a few clicks. How’s that? The content produced this way is neither thought out nor researched by a student. Neither is it someone’s work of study nor an expert’s experience or expertise.

In other words, AI content is shallow; it lacks human touch, depth, creativity, and true understanding of the topic.

To cap it off, AI tools are prone and pave the way to ethical, integral, and moral violations in their work.

Why Detect AI in Multi-Media?

AI’s capabilities extend beyond text-based content. These tools can generate realistic images, videos, and audio, presenting even greater risks when misused.

In fact, things only go downhill from here when it comes to multi-media AI tools, which are capable of generating real-life-like visuals.

To give you a glimpse of what that means, AI technology is now so advanced that it can generate fake images and videos of real-life people by just sampling a couple of pics of the individual. The person whose image is generated might not even be aware of this vile act that violates their privacy. All the more reasons to detect and moderate AI content.

Let’s dive deeper into why detecting AI might be important to understand the rationale, which can be divided into three major factors: ethical, integral, and moral concerns.

1. Ethical Concerns

Ethical concerns arise from the potential misuse of AI to manipulate or deceive through content creation. This includes generating fake but highly convincing text, images, or videos that can be harmful.

AI’s rapid evolution has raised substantial concerns regarding the ethics of using AI tools. Fake yet realistic text, video, image, and voice content can be easily generated and manipulated to execute any ulterior motives anyone might have against someone.

Things can get severe in the case of visuals; AI tools can be employed to create “deepfakes,” where a person’s fake yet identical version is created using their real images/videos. This can spread misinformation about the individual, tear down their reputation, or even get them accused of a crime they’ve never done.

If AI tools are available to the public, which they are, things can get out of control pretty fast. In this case, it comes down to governments and AI companies like OpenAI to shoulder the responsibility of eliminating such possibilities by one means or the other.

Strict ethical and moderate use of AI tools is needed to ensure no individuals suffer such a virtually tragic incident that can potentially harm their well-being in real life — which is only possible by implementing a system of algorithms to detect and restrict prohibited AI content.

2. Integral Concerns

Integral concerns address how AI tools affect intellectual properties and the integrity of existing creative works.

AI tools can replicate original styles and creations without the original creator or owner’s consent, causing plagiarism and copyright infringement issues.

We can learn more about how AI impacts creative works in the example of Sam Yang below:

A few years ago, Sam Yang — a digital creator and artist with a very specific art style who is looked up to by millions of followers — learned that people had found a way to generate artwork in his art style using AI tools.

Sam has been practicing art for about 20+ years now, and his art is the fruit of all those years of hard work — learning, experimenting, creating, and refining it, which is also the cornerstone of his livelihood. It goes without saying that finding out that anybody could now produce something exactly similar and even earn money from it with just a couple of clicks must be heart-wrenching.

Sam further learned that AI tools (some of which are publicly available) are trained on a dataset of billions of images scraped from the internet — including artworks uploaded by artists on the internet.

Now, all someone needs to mimic an artist’s style is to sample some images of the artist’s work and prompt the AI tool to mimic the style. This, to Sam, seemed to be an obvious intellectual copyright infringement because the images used by individuals to generate or by companies to train their AI tools never sought the consent of their owners, as he clarified in one of his YouTube videos, calling out to everyone in the art community to raise awareness about and speak against this conundrum. However, the situation hasn’t improved in the slightest.

This is just one example of how AI tools have paved the way for people to misuse someone’s intellectual properties, like art, music, literature, etc., causing plagiarism and copyright infringement and questioning the integrity and fair use of these tools — another reason why integrally questionable AI content must be detected and restricted.

3. Moral Concerns

Moral concerns revolve around the broader societal and personal implications of AI-generated content. The power to create realistic, deceptive, or harmful content challenges our moral values.

While “ethical” and “moral” concerns overlap, the latter is a broader factor. The ability to create life-like content that has the potential to deceive, harm, or manipulate people can have far-reaching consequences, challenging our moral values.

If AI tools are misused and abused, who should be held responsible in the practical world? The user? The creator of the tool? What about the ones funding it? And the ones hosting it? After all, a tool is a tool, much like the internet. And what about the consequences of unrestricted use of AI?

The moral obligation here is to use AI tools responsibly: ensure a fair and moderate use of AI and root for a system that can detect and restrict unreasonable instances of its use.

Conclusion

As AI technologies evolve, detecting AI becomes increasingly crucial to separate shallow content from an original and authentic one. It can allow us to prevent the misuse of AI and the violations that can potentially result from this misuse: copyright infringement, creating deepfakes, stirring up disinformation, and other violations. That’s why detecting AI content matters: it can allow us to implement content moderation that prevents any harm that lingers with its widespread use.