GRAND FORKS — Grand Forks believes in the future of artificial intelligence and technology and is working to grow in those areas, Mayor Brandon Bochenski told an audience brought together to discuss AI and autonomous systems in Grand Forks and the state.

“We’re standing on the great work that’s happened before us, and just trying to enhance it and make it better,” Bochenski said. “There’s 10, 20 years of work that goes into Grand Forks being put on the map. I’m just grateful that we’re on the map today.”

His sentiments were echoed by others attending the summit, one of the Innovation, Workforce and Research Conferences put on by IEEE-USA, a technical professional organization. The event was held Wednesday, Sept. 10, at the University of North Dakota Memorial Union. Between discussions on state innovation, education, workforce, networking and investing in AI and autonomy, leaders in the fields of AI and autonomy spoke to its presence at UND, Grand Forks and North Dakota as a whole.

Scott Snyder, vice president for research and economic development at UND, mirrored Bochenski’s statement on the decades of work put into the community. UND has been on the “absolute cutting edge of uncrewed and autonomous technologies and systems for well over two decades,” he said. The university also has multiple private and university partners, as well as partnerships with the Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration and other federal government entities.

“UND is at the center of one of the most vibrant environments for the development and deployment of autonomous systems around the world,” Snyder said.

An example of engagement between UND and the federal government was a discussion between UND President Andrew Armacost and Phillip Smith, the program manager for the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Smith admitted he doesn’t like the word “autonomy,” as he believes it acts similarly to words like “cyber” and “synergy” as jargon people use but don’t actually understand. Breaking down the subsections of autonomy and informing people is important, he said. When Armacost asked Smith what his definition of autonomy is, he said, “software that people don’t understand.”

“It is just an algorithm that cannot be explained to people until we get to general AI,” Smith said. “Humans actually don’t understand what is happening. … Machines are supposed to be serving humans, and humans don’t even know what they want, so that’s a really hard thing.”

Smith said DARPA is working with GrandSky, testing drones that will be able to find a ship at sea, and then orient and land on it without human connection. GrandSky is an aviation business park west of Grand Forks that specifically focuses on the UAS industry.

“That’s the program that we have out here in North Dakota testing, and it’s been really fun,” he said.

Armacost said each person in the room has the opportunity to engage with DARPA, including industry partners, university partners and others.

“They have a large number of avenues that they use to cooperate with their work on technology development,” he said.

The summit itself was the product of UND leaders interacting with IEEE-USA and having an interest in showcasing what the region is doing. Mark Askelson, vice president for research-national security, said he was at a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, summit with Ryan Adams, the dean of engineering and mines, and spoke with some IEEE-USA staff about possibly holding an event in Grand Forks. Askelson said it’s an opportunity to show what the region is doing to more people who don’t know about it. It also is helping forge new connections.

“Despite the fact that we are nationally recognized, I would argue in some of these areas, there’s still a lot of people that don’t know about us,” he said. “They don’t understand some of the things that we do, so that is a great opportunity to bring those people here so they can see us. And, in my experience, once we can get somebody on the ground to see what we have going on, the light bulb goes on for them. That creates more opportunity for us to work with them and for us to innovate.”

Realistic-looking news anchors delivering propaganda, popular television characters singing terrorist battle songs, online chatbots that tailor their responses to a user’s interests — these are all ways terrorist groups are using artificial intelligence (AI) to spread their message and recruit.

As AI technologies have spread across the internet, they have become tools that terrorist groups such as the Islamic State group (IS) and al-Qaida use to reach out to young people in Africa and elsewhere who have grown up with the internet and get their information from social media.

Cloaking terrorist propaganda in authentic-looking content helps get the messages past social media moderators, according to Daniel Siegel, who researches digital propaganda at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“By embedding extremist narratives within content that mimics the tone and style of popular entertainment, these videos navigate past the usual scrutiny applied to such messages, making the ideology more accessible and attractive to a wider audience,” Siegel wrote in an analysis for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.

Although the content often is designed to be funny, it also exploits viewers’ love for the characters to lure them into consuming more of the content without realizing they’re being indoctrinated, Siegel wrote.

“Deepfakes,” AI-generated messages that look real, are making it nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction, experts say. That undermines faith in legitimate media organizations and government institutions alike, according to researcher Lidia Bernd.

“Imagine a deepfake video depicting a political leader declaring war or a religious figure calling for violence,” Bernd wrote recently in the Georgetown Security Studies Review. “The potential for chaos and violence spurred by such content is enormous.”

Terrorist groups already use AI to create hyper-realistic fake content such as scenes of injured children or fabricated attacks designed to stoke viewers’ emotions.

By hiding terrorists’ actual human propagandists behind deepfake technology, AI undercuts facial recognition tools and hamstrings counterterrorism efforts, analyst Soumya Awasthi wrote recently for the Observer Research Foundation.

At least one group affiliated with al-Qaida has offered workshops on using AI to develop visual propaganda and a how-to guide for using chatbots to radicalize potential recruits. Chatbots and other AI technology also can generate computer code for cyberattacks, plan physical attacks and raise money through cryptocurrency.

Terrorist groups use AI to quickly produce propaganda content using video footage captured by drones on the battlefield. Those fake news videos can mirror the look of legitimate news operations such as Al Jazeera or CNN. AI-generated anchors can be tailored to resemble people from geographic regions or ethnic groups terrorists are targeting for recruitment.

IS uses such AI content as part of its “News Harvest” propaganda broadcasts. AI text-to-speech technology turns written scripts into human-sounding audio.

Counterterrorism experts say governments and social media companies need to do more to detect AI-generated content like that being created by IS and al-Qaida.

For social media companies, that can mean boosting open-source intelligence to keep up with terrorism trends. For AI companies, that can mean working with social media and government authorities to refine methods of detecting and blocking malicious use of their technology.

Terrorists’ use of AI is not without its limits. Some members of Islamist terror groups object to depicting human faces in the AI-generated images, forcing some creators to obscure the faces, lessening the impact of the video.

Terrorists also fear having AI turned against them.

Groups affiliated with al-Qaida have warned their members that security forces could use AI-generated audio to give fake commands to followers or otherwise to sow confusion and disrupt terrorist operations.

According to HumAngle, one such warning went out in Arabic via the Telegram messaging app to members of the Boko Haram splinter group Jama’atu Ansarul Muslimina fi Biladis Sudan in Nigeria.

The message, according to HumAngle, said: “New technologies have made it possible to create voices. Although they are yet to be as sophisticated as natural voices, they are getting better and can be used against Jihadists.”