The slippery slope of using AI and deepfakes to bring history to life

To mark Israel's Memorial Day in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces musical ensembles collaborated with a company that specializes in synthetic videos, also known as "deepfake" technology, to bring photos from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war to life. They produced a video in which young singers clad in period uniforms and carrying period weapons sang "Hareut," an iconic song commemorating soldiers killed in combat. As they sing, the musicians stare at faded black-and-white photographs they hold. The past comes to life, Harry Potter style. For the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston's Applied Ethics Center have been studying how everyday engagement with AI challenges the way people think about themselves and politics. We've found that AI has the potential to weaken people's capacity to make ordinary judgments.