What are the trending concerns that consumers and business need to be aware of as 2024 looms? According to two analysts, some major concerns include the rise of deepfake videos together with the electronic disruption caused by bots.
According to Stuart Wells, CTO of Jumio, businesses and consumers need to be continually concerned about deepfakes. The use of AI to create images, sounds and videos and attribute these to things that did not actually take place is a major threat – and one that is expanding.
Wells finds, in relation to the growing menace: By the end of 2024, 95 percent of consumers in the U.S. will have fallen victim to a deepfake.”
This is partly driven by the widespread availability of the technology that enables deepfakes to happen. According to Wells: “Every company and consumer is jumping on the AI bandwagon, and fraudsters are no exception. Cybercriminals have previously found ways to cheat the system.”
As an example, Wells says: “Earlier in 2023, they were found bypassing ChatGPT’s anti-abuse restrictions to generate and review malicious code.”
He adds: “Now, ChatGPT is fully connected to the internet and has the ability to generate images — a recipe for the perfect deepfake.”
The tactics and technology are also becoming more sophisticated. This leads Wells to cite: “In 2023, 52 percent of consumers believed they could detect a deepfake video, reflecting an over-confidence in consumers. Deepfakes have become highly sophisticated and practically impossible to detect by the naked eye, and now generative AI makes their creation easier than ever.”
Consequently, finds Wells: “Misinformation is already spreading like wildfire, and deepfakes will only get more complicated with the upcoming elections. By the end of 2024, the vast majority of U.S. consumers will have been exposed to a deepfake, whether they knew it to be synthetic media or not.”
These concerns are picked up by Bala Kumar, CPO of Jumio, who looks at a different form of identify fraud – the number of ‘influencer bots’ on social media will exceed the number of real human accounts.
Kumar’s assessment is that “Nearly half of Internet traffic is now bots — alarming, considering this is almost equivalent to the amount of human-operated Internet traffic. And while catfishing has been around for a while, bot-operated social media accounts bring a new meaning to the word.”
Outlining just how widespread this is, Kumar presents: “Many social media users have already come across social media accounts that are entirely bot-operated, posing as influencers with seemingly realistic posts and comments. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for social media users to discern real accounts from fake ones.”
A means to tackle this is through greater scrutiny, as Kumar recommends: “On the other hand, businesses are also paying these ‘influencers’ to promote their products without even knowing they are fraudulent. The onus will be on social media platforms to deploy identity verification tools with advanced liveness detection technologies to identify bot-operated accounts.”
