{"id":291277,"date":"2025-11-30T11:06:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T11:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/291277\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T11:06:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T11:06:19","slug":"ai-is-coming-for-our-most-intimate-communications-congress-must-act-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/291277\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Is Coming for Our Most Intimate Communications. Congress Must Act | Opinion\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

For most of us, the idea that a loved one might communicate with us using AI is unsettling. After all, authenticity is a touchstone of human interactions.\u00a0In the research that I conduct on community enga<\/a>gement<\/a>, I frequently discuss authenticity and emotional intelligence\u2014one\u2019s capacity to read and navigate a person\u2019s emotions. Both traits are indispensable in forging\u00a0durable, trusting connections and collaborations<\/a>\u00a0with people, and they\u2019re two of the few remaining things separating human cognition from that of AI.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an actual name for the \u201cick\u201d we feel when we suspect someone\u2019s been using AI with us in personal discussions:\u00a0Capgras syndrome<\/a>. Named after French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras, the rare condition, first described in the 1920s, speaks to the deeply internalized fear we have that someone (or something) familiar is an \u201cimposter\u201d: in this case, your resident AI assistant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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In recent years, AI barons have been dumping loads of R&D into\u00a0addressing AI\u2019s authenticity gap<\/a>. Their hope is to eliminate AI\u2019s creepy uncanny valley, an effect that has long made the technology feel more like sci-fi novelty than an instrument that could serve a practical function in people\u2019s everyday lives. To this end, Big AI has been successful in, at a minimum, shaking up the notion of human authenticity in\u00a0education<\/a>,\u00a0art<\/a> and\u00a0customer service<\/a>.\u00a0We now need to contend with the idea that AI is starting to make our relationships and personal communication to one another less authentic\u2014and potentially less meaningful.<\/p>\n

Our concerns on this broader matter are already high.\u00a0In a March YouGov poll<\/a>, 80 percent of Americans indicated being either very or somewhat concerned about AI leading to the manipulation of human behavior. That comes amid a generational erosion in trust we have in each other\u2014only one-third of Americans in 2024\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0feeling that most people can be trusted, a decline from roughly half in 1984 when the poll\u2019s numbers peaked. (As a snapshot, the dip in trust is about\u00a0as Orwellian as could be<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Interpersonal trust is only poised to decline as AI rapidly becomes a tool we lean more heavily on as a surrogate communicator\u2014not just in\u00a0our emails and professional reports<\/a>, but also in our\u00a0online dating profiles<\/a>,\u00a0apology letters to loved ones<\/a> and\u00a0birthday\u00a0wishes<\/a>. Increasingly sophisticated AI-generated photos and videos also mean we may be suspicious of the personal media friends and family share with us. Imagine, for instance, believing a cousin\u2019s Instagram video of their vacation to Paris was faked via a seamless AI video generator like\u00a0Sora<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While people might love using AI as a writing tool, they aren\u2019t so keen on being on the receiving end.\u00a0In studies conducted in the U.S. and U.K.<\/a>, researchers found that most people consider the undisclosed use of AI in interpersonal messages to be inappropriate, and when people disclose that they used AI,\u00a0they tend to be trusted less<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our best approach to dealing with AI\u2019s infiltration into our interpersonal spaces isn\u2019t to erect barriers to stop it. It\u2019s to be more cognizant of when it\u2019s used\u2014and why. Beyond knowing the\u00a0telltale signs<\/a>\u00a0of AI use, we need\u00a0authentication<\/a>\u00a0tools that tell people what is and is not AI-generated. This can range from watermarking AI content, to more complex tools like cryptographic\u00a0provenance tracking<\/a>, which involves creating metadata, or \u201cdata trails,\u201d that let end-users know how, when and where content was produced. But these approaches are far from infallible, with efforts to\u00a0remove AI watermarks<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0destroy AI metadata<\/a>\u00a0arguably rivaling the very efforts to create them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI ethicists<\/a>\u00a0like me have long championed authentication, but lawmakers in the U.S. have yet to\u00a0meaningfully support it. AI leaders like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT), have also been reticent\u00a0advocates<\/a>,\u00a0and that\u2019s mostly\u00a0because they recognize that a key appeal of AI for many is that it feels \u201creal.\u201d Authentication\u00a0quashes\u00a0that illusion. In addition, authentication, in curtailing how we present content,\u00a0raises\u00a0some admittedly\u00a0thorny questions about free speech<\/a>.\u00a0However, society\u2019s need for transparency should outweigh this. And ultimately, deeper political commitment to authentication could help reverse the public\u2019s\u00a0broad distrust of AI companies<\/a>\u00a0and facilitate more comfort around AI\u2019s integration into our lives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2024, the Biden administration began\u00a0requiring federal agencies to publicly disclose their AI utilization.<\/a>\u00a0Currently, President Donald Trump\u2019s\u00a0AI action plan,\u00a0<\/a>in keeping with his administration\u2019s general\u00a0antagonism toward transparency initiatives<\/a>, doesn\u2019t embrace this approach. Congress should that require AI platforms\u2014such as those offered by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Apple\u2014incorporate provenance tracking and provide users with a seamless way to determine whether a particular piece of content, such a video clip, song, or even text message, was produced by AI. Guardrails like these are imperfect, but they may make someone who\u2019s intent on using AI in a deceitful or subversive way think twice. And these guardrails may yet help us keep at least a sliver of lives completely AI-free\u2014assuming that\u2019s what we actually want.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jerel Ezell is a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He studies the cultural aspects of health and technology.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For most of us, the idea that a loved one might communicate with us using AI is unsettling.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,5611,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-291277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-congress","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}