After seeing online advertising for “Willy’s Cbocolate Experience”, people paid up to £80 each to attend. But it wasn’t as promised: instead of wondrous creations and an abundance of chocolate, families arrived at a mostly abandoned warehouse featuring a sad-looking castle. Later it emerged that the marketing materials were produced by artificial intelligence. Misleading ads are just one example of a common problem in our digitalised world. Yet even as deception (欺骗) grows more complicated, countermeasures are being developed.
There is an arms race going on in the digital world. 1[■] Understanding that evolutionary conflict can help us beat those who aim to lie to us. Disinformation certainly predates the existence of humans. Cancer cells, for example, trick the immune system into treating them as a normal part of the body, causing white blood cells useless against them.
2[■] Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. The foster parents are then deceived into raising the young of others at the expense of their own. More complex are cases where wild tufted capuchin monkeys may scream as though a predator (捕食者) is nearby to trick their fellow primates into running away from food. 3[■]
This links to the Red Queen hypothesis, which refers to a case where two organisms compete to outsmart each other. 4[■] Cuckoos compete with host birds. Primates compete with each other. In each conflict, a new strategy by one party forces the other to adapt - or face elimination in the cold game of natural selection.
Disinformation today is a more complex version of the false monkey screams. The good news is that we know enough about evolutionary thinking to predict which steps bad actors will take next. 5[■] We have novel ways to trick it into evolving a weakness that we then take advantage of, a process called “evolutionary trapping”. Similarly, we know someone will try to outfox the tools being developed to counter deepfakes. We can predict what the next form of deepfake will look like, then prevent it.