AI firms should face prison over creation of fake humans, says Yuval Noah Harari

The creators of AI bots that masquerade as people should face harsh criminal sentences comparable to those who trade in counterfeit currency, the Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari has said. He also called for sanctions, including prison sentences, to apply to tech company executives who fail to guard against fake profiles on their social media platforms. Addressing the UN's AI for Good global summit in Geneva, the author of Sapiens and Home Deus said the proliferation of fake humans could lead to a collapse in public trust and democracy. "Now it is possible, for the first time in history, to create fake people – billions of fake people," he said. "If this is allowed to happen it will do to society what fake money threatened to do to the financial system. If you can't know who is a real human, trust will collapse. "Maybe relationships will be able to manage somehow, but not democracy," Harari added. The advent of ChatGPT and other large language models means AI bots can not only amplify human content, but also artificially generate their own content at scale. "What happens if you have a social media platform where … millions of bots can create content that is in many ways superior to what humans can create – more convincing, more appealing," he said. "If we allow this to happen, then humans have completely lost control of the public conversation.