This new Google gadget has everything out of Pandora’s box

AI must be “bold and responsible”. This is the leitmotif that permeated yesterday’s opening speech at Google I/O. And in the role of an adventurous visionary but aware of his responsibility, it was James Manica, chief technology and community chief of the Mountain View giant, who had the opportunity to talk about Google’s perils and duties.

He was also the one who introduced the Universal Translator. A tool that looks like a revolution or Pandora’s box, in a world of False news Based on Deep fakes. As part of the example given, it already allows from a video recorded in English, which is a lesson in this case, to transcribe the content of the video, and then translate it. So far, nothing out of the ordinary. It will then reproduce the speaker’s pitches and apply them to a synthetic voice in another language, in Spanish for demonstration purposes. This is impressive, but not necessarily alarming in and of itself. In the next step, things get complicated.

Indeed, Universal Translator will make sure that the lip movements of the native speaker, the person captured in the video, are synchronized so that it gives the impression that he has pronounced the message in the destination language… Case applications are numerous, whether in education or business, but this new barrier that is being His erasure between real and altered reality clearly reveals here that there is potential for problems and abuse, even if not everything is technically optimal yet.

Good news, Google too. James Manica spoke “The tension between audacity and responsibility”. That is why he announced from the very beginning that the service is not only completely experimental, but that it was not intended to be accessible to everyone, but only to selected partners.

We can also hope that the development of this project will be subject to the tail forks of the seven rules related to artificial intelligence enacted by Google in 2018.

• to be socially useful
• Avoid creating or reinforcing prejudices
• They are designed and tested with safety in mind
• Be accountable to your users
• Integrate the principles of respect for privacy
• Maintaining the requirements of scientific excellence
• be available for uses consistent with these principles.

The same AI principles that James Manica mentioned a few minutes later helped Cyclops do this Decide what not to do. It was these principles that prevented Google from getting into public APIs for facial recognition years ago, for example, he explained, because The guarantees at that time were not enough.. Same principles that prevented Google from hitting the play button in the pre-OpenAi ChatGPT equivalent too? maybe. One solution, for James Manica is Addressing challenges as they arise Thanks to innovation and respect for a certain ethic it looks approx “do not be evil”.

Anyway, it was with these principles that Google had designed Universal Translator with safeguards to avoid dangerous uses. Furthermore, the videos being processed must be subject to the precautions announced by James Manica. Hence, Google should soon Incorporating new watermark innovations into [ses] Latest generative models to help protect against misinformation ».

If it’s difficult to know exactly what all these safeguards will consist of, and if of course Google says it wants to control the uses of its technology, it’s imperative that you bear in mind the leak of an AI model from the Meta at the beginning of last spring. The leak that opened the door to abuse on the one hand, but also acted as an accelerator for the issue thanks to the open source world taking over on the other. Evil and good, again. Google knows this, and seeks to work upstream to protect itself, avoiding the worst, in a context in which it seems impossible to impose a ban on a domain that is changing rapidly and is being disturbed by capitalist geostrategic issues. In the end, we always come back to that razor edge between daring and responsibility. And so Universal Translator has everything out of Pandora’s box. Let’s not forget that at the bottom of this legendary chest always hides hope.