While I am deeply concerned about the long-term existential threat of AI and synthetic biology to create new or modified pathogens, my extensive experience detecting and controlling outbreaks around the world makes me fear a more immediate threat: a rogue actor using existing AI tools to simulate a bioterrorism attack that would destabilize a region or the world.
There is an urgent need for health and security agencies to raise awareness about this risk. Health and security agencies need to run exercises — as they often do already for suspected bioterrorism attacks — about how they will, in fact, verify whether audio and video reports are real and what standard of evidence they will use to make this determination.
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Public health officials need training and access to technology solutions that can authenticate media, and governments at all levels must consider laws that hold creators and distributors of deepfakes liable.
