Fakes at Scale: AI, Phishing, and Synthetic Media (Virtual Sample Class)

Phishing used to be easy to spot: a strange sender address, broken English, a link that didn't quite match. That is no longer true. A language model can write a personalized, plausible message to ten thousand people for almost nothing, and a few seconds of recorded audio is enough to clone a voice. This class covers how these systems work, in enough depth to see why the old advice about spotting fakes has stopped being useful, and then turns to what the security community is doing in response. Some of that work is detection, which is largely a losing arms race, and some of it is authentication: establishing where a message actually came from instead of guessing whether it looks real. The class will be candid about which of these problems remain open, because most of them do. No programming or math background is expected. The professor will be Dr. Kristopher Micinski, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who teaches Syracuse's course on AI and cybersecurity. We will encourage you to enable your audio and video to engage with us and ask questions.