Efforts are under way to educate seniors in the Capital Region about artificial intelligence and online safety.
According to Dr. Andrew Hurd, a computer science professor at Empire State University, artificial intelligence is everywhere.
Explaining the technology to seniors at the Malta Community Center Monday as part of a discussion organized by Malta Seniors, Hurd compared AI with a choose-your-own-adventure book.
“If you agree with Johnny, you're going way down over this tree, over this way. If you agree with Jane, you're going way down over this way. But all those decisions, it's already processed the next best thing,” Hurd said.
Hurd asked attendees to be aware of the technology and how it’s utilized on social media. He urged people to not to be fooled by AI-generated images, and explained how to tell the difference between what's real and what's not.
“You start looking for other subtleties, like having no faces on the cards, having a card game that makes absolutely no sense, right? There's certain things that I looked at this and I said, Well, that's pretty good. And then I started looking at all the faces. All the women look the same, all the men look the same,” Hurd said.
Malta resident Candee Miller said her son works for an AI company. While the technology is nothing new for her, she appreciated the cybersecurity lesson.
She says she’s already been scammed once, and has no interest in repeating the experience.
“They took money out of my savings account and gave it to Spectrum, and they paid $2,000 out of my account, and I called Spectrum, and I had a credit,” Miller said.
Miller said it took two days working with her bank to get everything sorted out.
Mary Calabro, also from Malta, said she's been tricked by AI on social media before.
“A group of my friends, we were discussing a certain post that we saw. Two of us thought it was real and two of us thought it was AI-generated, and we never came to a conclusion,” Calabro said.
Calabro said she has a daughter who works in cybersecurity and is keeping her up-to-date.
“My daughter had us set up a family code word, so if anybody calls and says, you know, ‘Mikey needs $500 to be bailed out of jail,’ well, ‘Mikey, you know, what's the code word?’” Calabro said.
Earleen Van, of Ballston Spa, also knows someone who has been scammed...and has been scammed herself, by someone posing as a Spectrum representative.
“The only reason I got scammed because I was planning on calling him that day, and they called you, yeah, it's like, oh well, you're here. And then after I got off the phone, it hit me. So I called Spectrum, and I went to my bank and I froze everything,” Van said.
Hurd said all people, especially seniors, should be wary of scammers. To protect themselves, he suggested people use multi-factor authentication on accounts, and not to bother paying for services that advertise they'll protect your Social Security number.
“You call the Social Security Administration office and say, I would like to put two-factor authentication on my Social Security number, and they will, so if someone tries to open an account with your social security number, you get a phone call from the Social Security Administration,” Hurd said.
The Federal Trade Commission reports Americans lost $10 billion to scams and fraud in 2023.
