Digital Hydras: Navigating the Dark Depths of the Internet

From Innocence to Enlightenment: A Lifelong Learning Crusade Against the Virus of Online Deception

Image by Tami Arens from Pixabay

The dream is over: my innocence is charred, shattered, and ripped away by the veritable hellish reality of what the internet has morphed into.

It is now a dank — dark cesspool — stocked with a plethora of bad actors, grifters and propagandists: its horrifying filthy primordial depths of depravity spawn a creature akin to the fabled Hydra: a regenerative creature of disinformation, misinformation and propaganda that poses the greatest threat democracy has ever faced.

When one thread of depravity is stemmed, more spawn to replace it. Is all hope lost: Is the beast truly immortal? Can we tame its malevolent tendencies and send them scurrying back to the shadows from whence it clawed its way out?

I have my doubts! A recent addition of tools to the fertile workshop of bad actors worries me greatly: the super fecund seed of generative AI. While generative AI has myriad potential for good: so do knives and guns…

AI is already being used in nefarious ways: for example, deepfakes putting another person’s head on a porn video. Furthermore, some people have had their voices replicated in an effort to scam family and friends out of money.

I want my innocence back: the sense of profound wonder that gripped my soul as I stepped out of the BBS age and onto the immense open stage of the world wide web. I want to be positive; I really do, but how do we find solutions when the beast has tentacles that draw lifeblood from the heart of rogue states far beyond the diminutive reach of reasonable solutions proposed by reasonable states? Pandora is out of the box and will not go gently into that good night again.

I truly think that education from the womb to the tomb is the solution: we must inoculate people against the virus of bad actors since preventing exposure is akin to picking fly droppings out of ground pepper with boxing gloves on.

References

Criminals are using AI in terrifying ways. (2023). Retrieved 16 June 2023, from https://nypost.com/2023/05/10/criminals-are-using-ai-in-terrifying-ways/