A.I. Is Making Death Threats Way More Realistic

Media|A.I. Is Making Death Threats Way More Realistic

Even though she was toughened by years spent working in internet activism, Caitlin Roper found herself traumatized by the online threats she received this year.

There was the picture of herself hanging from a noose, dead. And another of herself ablaze, screaming.

The posts were part of a surge of vitriol directed at Ms. Roper and her colleagues at Collective Shout, an Australian activist group, on X and other social media platforms. Some of it, including images of the women flayed, decapitated or fed into a wood chipper, was seemingly enabled — and given a visceral realism — by generative artificial intelligence. In some of the videos, Ms. Roper was wearing a blue floral dress that she does, in fact, own.

“It’s these weird little details that make it feel more real and, somehow, a different kind of violation,” she said. “These things can go from fantasy to more than fantasy.”

Artificial intelligence is already raising concerns for its ability to mimic real voices in service of scams or to produce deepfake pornography without a subject’s permission. Now, the technology is also being used for violent threats — priming them to maximize fear by making them far more personalized, more convincing and more easily delivered.

“Two things will always happen when technology like this gets developed: We will find clever and creative and exciting ways to use it, and we will find horrific and awful ways to abuse it,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “What’s frustrating is that this is not a surprise.”