It has become child’s play to usurp the identity of the Prime Minister in a hyperfaking generated by artificial intelligence (AI), warns the Quebec authority on the subject, Yoshua Bengio, before federal elected officials on Thursday.
“You might get a phone call from a political leader, and think it’s really that person [au bout du fil] », Illustrated the founder of Mila-Québec, an artificial intelligence research institute located in Montreal.
Yoshua Bengio was part of a panel of experts invited to speak virtually before the parliamentary committee on ethics, which focused its work on the impacts of disinformation on the work of parliamentarians.
A Liberal elected official drew her attention to the fact that the image of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is realistically usurped in cryptocurrency scams that are proliferating on the social network Facebook. According to the expert, this type of hyperfaking can now be produced in one click by anyone.
“These are really easy to make. A child can do that on a laptop,” he says.
In his opinion, the type of software that makes these tricks possible, now very accessible, should be declared to the government, and the authorities should demand that they be shown the efforts made to prevent them from being used for purposes dangerous to the public. democracy. “That’s a minimum. »
Disrupting the functioning of democracies
These proposals were part of his plea to federal elected officials on the importance of more strictly regulating AI by the government. The impressive advances in this technology also have the potential to disrupt the proper functioning of democracies. Above all, he predicts, that machines could become more intelligent than humans within a decade.
“IA has the potential to generate significant social and economic benefits, but only if we govern it wisely, instead of enduring it and hoping for the best. »
Yoshua Bengio would even like to see public authorities, such as the Government of Canada, invest in less profitable niches of AI, but which have the potential to be beneficial to society. For example, he illustrated to Bloc Québécois MP René Villemure the fact that AI is currently not advanced in terms of fact-checking, but that such a thing would be useful, like an “immune system” for democracy.
This issue also has a whole geostrategic dimension, since China is the second country in the world in terms of the development of artificial intelligence, after the United States. Other smaller players, such as Russia, also have free access to powerful tools open to all, such as Meta’s artificial intelligence, called Llama.
Before taking part remotely in the federal parliamentary committee, Thursday afternoon, Yoshua Bengio participated in a dinner conference with the President of France, Emmanuel Macron and the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, in Montreal. At the end of this meeting, France named Canada as the country of honor at the next edition of its Viva Technology 2025 technology conference in Paris. A Canadian delegation must take part to improve collaboration between France and Canada in the area of artificial intelligence.