Associated Incidents
CINCINNATI --- The real U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, met with Israel's prime minister on Monday in Washington, D.C.
On Tuesday, the State Department said someone using artificial intelligence has been sending scam messages with a voice that sounds like Rubio's to foreign embassies, a U.S. senator and a governor.
"What system's in place for this?" Summer Crenshaw wondered during a conversation at her home in Greater Cincinnati.
As the founder of an annual event called Cincy AI Week, Crenshaw said the Marco Rubio deepfake is an example of bad actors trying to manipulate artificial intelligence to their advantage.
"I think our biggest vulnerability is our human trust," Crenshaw said. "And when you see things like this, a story like this that's breaking human trust, it's going to give you anxiety."
"One thing to keep in mind, especially with the Rubio case and a lot of these other cases, is there's a reason a lot of the impersonations we hear right now are famous people or people who have a public following," Andrew Zolides said.
Zolides is an associate professor at Xavier University and a digital media expert. He said scammers are using AI tools that can quickly synthesize the hours and hours of conversations Rubio has had in public to recreate his voice and try to trick people into sharing sensitive information.
"Folks at the highest level of government are always going to be concerned about different forms of hacking, information access, impersonation. And this is really at the cutting edge of that," Zolides said.
Crenshaw knows the Rubio deepfake will rattle a lot of nerves, but she's a believer in what she considers to be the positive power of AI.
"We know that there's more opportunity ahead with AI," she said. "It's just we're going to go through the bumps and the bruises when we're coming down to adopting it."
The State Department has warned U.S. diplomats stationed around the world about the impersonation scheme. While efforts to find out who's responsible continue, one government official has indicated the scam has not been successful so far.