Until this weekend, I don’t recall ever hearing of Michael Schumacher. In case you were similarly unaware, he’s a former Formula One racing champion who suffered a severe head injury in a skiing accident back in 2013. Since that time, he’s not been seen in public and has remained at home under the care of his family. So his fans must have been pleased when the German Magazine Die Aktuelle (“The Actual”) published an issue with his face on the cover bearing the title, “The First Interview.” The piece included multiple quotes about how the accident had “changed my life forever.” But there was one major problem with the article. It was completely fake and had been generated using AI. The editor of the magazine was immediately fired. (NDTV)

The editor-in-chief of a German magazine that published an artificial intelligence-generated ‘interview’ with Michael Schumacher has been sacked, BBC reported. The tabloid named Die Aktuelle has also apologised to the family of the Formula One legend.

”This tasteless and misleading article should never have appeared. It in no way corresponds to the standards of journalism that we and our readers expect from a publisher like Funke,” said Bianca Pohlmann, managing director of Funke magazines.

”As a result of the publication of this article, immediate personnel consequences will be drawn. Die Aktuelle editor-in-chief Anne Hoffmann, who has held journalistic responsibility for the paper since 2009, will be relieved of her duties as of today,” she added.

The management of the magazine has apologized profusely to Schumacher’s family and everyone seems to agree that they are dealing with an extremely challenging situation. Netflix produced a documentary in 2021 about the family’s efforts to provide him with a comfortable life. So the magazine’s hoax interview was obviously in very poor taste.

But the bigger story here is that we’re seeing one of the early examples of how Artificial Intelligence can cause real-world problems in the wrong hands. It’s true that there were hints in the article suggesting that it wasn’t true reporting. (The subtitle read, “It sounded deceptively real.”) But that was never made clear, and many people could have been left with the impression that Schumacher was well on his way to recovery.

I decided to test this concept myself, so I asked ChatGPT to “generate a four-question interview with Ron DeSantis about his previous gubernatorial election victory.” It immediately responded by saying, “Sure. Here’s a sample interview between a reporter and Ron DeSantis.” That was followed by four wholly believable and almost stereotypical questions that any reporter would ask the Florida governor. Each was followed by an answer that almost perfectly matched answers he’s given to similar questions in the past. But when I searched for the exact text online, there was no match. It was a fake interview that the chatbot stitched together from existing interviews DeSantis has given. But if I hadn’t generated it myself, I never would have suspected for a moment that it was fake. (And I do this for a living.)

When you combine the text-generating capabilities of AI with the other deepfake video capabilities that have shown up, imagine the negative possibilities. During the entire time that Senator John Fetterman was locked away in the hospital, the media wondered how badly his cognitive decline had become and when or if he might return to work. His staff could have used AI to create a fake interview showing him cogently explaining that he was functioning almost normally and well on his way to recovery. Would we have been able to tell the difference?

I’ve been on the internet since the days when we used dial-in modems and America On Line CDs. This technology has brought us many amazing things. But virtually every single one of those “advancements” has also brought damaging side effects and the potential for abuse. Artificial Intelligence is clearly continuing this trend and is taking it to the next level.