Let's stop vilifying AI's imitation powers

Very recently, the outbreak of AI-doctored pornographic videos in which the faces of the original actors had been swapped with those of celebrities and politicians caused panic over the implications of artificial intelligence applications blurring the line between what's real and what's not. Similar concerns surfaced when Google demonstrated an AI technology that could create human voice patterns that were indistinguishable from humans at last week's I/O Conference. For the most part, the concerns are well-placed. Thanks to advances in machine learning and deep learning, AI applications are becoming extremely convincing at reproducing human appearance and behavior. There are already several applications that can convincingly synthesize a person's face, voice, handwriting, and even conversation style.