WACO, Texas (KWTX) – A new online trend is blowing up. People are sharing personal details with artificial intelligence to generate custom caricatures meant to represent who they are or what they do.
But cyber security experts warn that this trend may not be as harmless as it seems. They say handing over personal information and photos to AI tools could put your privacy at risk.
Typing in general information like your hobbies or your job title, such as playing tennis or working as a software engineer, is largely harmless but experts say the risk increases when you upload photos of yourself or your family.
David Grover, the senior director for cyber initiatives at Baylor University, says once that information is uploaded, you lose control of it.
“In general, all of them are going to save your information and that information is going to go into some kind of storage and at that point, you don’t really know what that company is doing with your information,” he explains.
Grover says as AI technology becomes more advanced, protecting personal data becomes more difficult. “You need to be careful about any image that you put in and anything that you put online because that becomes who you are and the more we get into the digital world, the more challenging it’s going to become to protect.”
Because of those risks, he recommends using AI as a tool to improve work you’ve already created rather than handing over personal data to generate something entirely new.
“It always starts with what you create and nothing can touch your own creation so I always encourage people to start there and then use AI as a polishing tool,” Grover says.
The unknown surrounding artificial intelligence are why experts say education needs to start early. “We want to go in as early as we can in education, in that K-12 space, to teach kids about what happens when you put your information into chats and into AI,” Grover says.
SO before you follow the next viral trend, experts say it’s worth asking whether the result is worth the risk.
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