I Don't Think It Should Be Easier to Put Rat Poison in Baby Food

Yes, This Is About AI

Last week, there was a news story about how someone has been putting rat poison in jars of baby food.

On Saturday, HiPP recalled its entire range of jarred purées sold in Spar supermarkets in Austria, saying consuming them may be potentially “life-threatening”.

(…)

The jar had apparently been tampered with, police said. Authorities believe at least one more poisoned jar is in circulation and have issued guidance on how to recognise tampered jars.

— From this BBC article

My hot take is that this is bad. But at least it seems like something that’s pretty hard to do! And that’s why I don’t think it would be great if someone developed and released a way to make putting rat poison in baby food much easier and at a large scale.¹ Even if it (apparently) is technically possible today!

I’m saying this to try to illustrate a terrible argument regarding AI and misinformation, that I’m (still) seeing all over the place: “Misinformation, and tools like Photoshop and CGI has been a thing for a long time. Heck, you had alterations of photos in the Soviet Union! So the fact that AI is making this much, much easier, at an enormous scale, doesn’t change anything, actually. At least not for the worse, for some reason.”