The AI snake in smartphones.Poison or antidote?

As Al frauds grow, can Al smartphones be the modern antidote—detecting deepfakes, scams, and cyber threats before they poison digital trust?

- BY PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

Ever heard of Mithridates of Pontus? The ruler was so scared of nefarious royal plots and assassination attempts that he started fiddling I with toxicology. He, as the myth goes, took small doses of lethal poisons in a clever concoction to make himself immune to any kind of attack mixed in his food.

If he could do that, why can we not? Especially when the arsenic of Al-deep-fakes, the snake bites of audio/video cloning and the venom of AI frauds can be anywhere in the air today? Brad Pitt look-alikes, Sunil Mittal's voice-cloned finance instructions, a CFO on a video call asking an employee for a big money transfer, a family member begging for help in an emergency, or a cop executing a digital arrest-the colours may vary. Still, the poison stays lethal and becomes more and more dangerous. And right now, it is someone else's big bowl of pudding.

THE SNAKE PIT OF AI-THREATS

2024 was full of vipers coming out of all kinds of sleeves. We all know how sophisticated, smart, sly, on-the-nose and well-equipped Al-enabled scammers and fraudsters have become. They can clone voices. They can fake faces.

They can push the right emotional buttons. All made possible with AI on steroids.

Digital arrest victims could have easily lost more than Rs 2,100 crore in India in the last few months. Almost 64% of respondents admitted to increased fraud losses over the past year, as spotted in a February 2024 study by Forrester Consulting-Experian. These fangs will only grow more deadly and longer in the near future.

According to reports, authorities warn that Indians could lose more than Rs 1.2 lakh crore over the next year to cyber fraud. These losses could be as high as 0.7% of GDP.