The latest digital security bulletin from the FBI is sure to turn some heads, in both the literal and figurative sense. According to the US federal law enforcement agency, criminals are using AI-generated images to put a new spin on blackmail. They've been seen using publicly-posted images on social media and running them through an AI image generator to create convincing (but entirely fake) nude photos, then extorting the victims for money or real photos, in a practice the bureau is calling "sextortion." This sort of thing isn't exactly new -- nothing was stopping malefactors from using social media selfies and Photoshop before, and that's happened in some isolated cases. The danger comes from the ease of access to this technique created by new AI "deepfake" image tools. Now criminals don't need months or years of experience in convincing image manipulation, they just need a few photos and the right software.

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Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores. The technology -- which is imperfect but improving rapidly -- is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique. To do this well, the algorithms must be fed hundreds of thousands of images of a diverse array of faces. Increasingly, those photos are coming from the internet, where they're swept up by the millions without the knowledge of the people who posted them, categorized by age, gender, skin tone and dozens of other metrics, and shared with researchers at universities and companies. As the algorithms get more advanced -- meaning they are better able to identify women and people of color, a task they have historically struggled with -- legal experts and civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm on researchers' use of photos of ordinary people.