This past weekend, I was so thankful to have my family safe and healthy and alive.

The events of the Thursday before left us psychologically weakened state due to the acts of a malicious swatter. Swatting is the act of calling in an incident to emergency services such as 911 with the express intent to draw extreme police forces, including SWAT teams, to a particular location, typically for the purposes of psychological damage to the target victim. Last Thursday, I and my family were the victims.

It was supposed to be a bittersweet occasion; we were launching our daughter into a new phase in her life — college. It was the tail end of family orientation activities and student orientation was supposed to begin that evening. Instead, an anonymous coward decided to call in a threat to the police and we all receive ACTIVE SHOOTER ALERT on our phones while hundreds of families were sitting in lawn chairs in a wide open field. Everyone started ducking down and panicking. Someone said to just stay still and just stay down to the ground. I noticed the herd was thinning out and I didn’t want my family to be an easy target, so I yelled, “RUN!!” and pointed straight ahead. My wife fell and I took a step back to get her back on her feet. And in those few seconds, I lost sight of our youngest daughter. I yelled at my older daughter, “WHERE IS SHE!! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WATCH OUT FOR HER!!” We still ran ahead as I was hoping to find her, looking scanning, every where I could, but still ducking low and moving forward. It was then that I heard a pistol shot and turned around into the nearest dormitory. We turned left into a hallway and a kind student motioned for us to enter. She had seen my younger daughter and told her to come into her room and my daughter had spotted our family. This kind student was initially deathly afraid to open her door. Who knows who she could be letting in? But courageously, she opened her door for my daughter. And eventually, her single dorm room was filled with strangers who had also seen us file into her room. We turned off the lights, pushed a dresser in front of the door and my family went under the bed which was slightly raised. I did not see room for myself under the bed, so I just sat there on the floor guarding the entrance to under the bed. Over the next two hours, we lived in fear, not knowing whether the next few moments would be our last ones on this earth or not.

Pranks like this happen and are often forgotten. It is a sincere tragedy when a real incident like this happened in Minneapolis and two children lost their lives. I cannot imagine how that has wrecked the families and their communities. The threat of gun violence is so real with guns being so abundant and easily accessible. And the ease in which someone can call in an anonymous tip and psychologically and emotionally scar over a thousand families at once. The current state of technology is woefully inadequate to keep up with the mass destruction that can be caused.

With Gen AI and deep fakes, things will only get worse. I’m actually a bit shocked that image models like nano banana will let you generate images portraying real celebrities doing things that they did not do in real life. Someone can take this image and generate a realistic video that most people will believe, combine it with a voice synthesis model which only needs a few short audio clips to recreate a person’s voice and intonation, saying whatever you want to make them say. It is so easy and accessible to make a thoroughly convincing deep fake that can cause massive damage. I don’t know why these models aren’t being regulated.

It could be that there is so much money and power to be gained by the companies that win this AI race that government just turns a blind eye. Anthropic was founded by Dario Amodei to stay true to Open AI’s original mission to build safely aligned AI. The split happened after Open AI signed a significant deal with Microsoft that act signaled to Amodei that OpenAI was now focused on reckless hyper growth rather than safe growth of AI. Many AI models will not output results due to copyright or ethics violations. This is sometimes frustrating, but ultimately it is a good thing if implemented properly. But this is not mandated at a legal level. It is purely up to whoever is developing the AI model.

Grok has a flirty anime AI avatar that can get sexually explicit with children as young as 13. Grok has even previously called itself “mecha-Hitler” and also responded in a very inappropriate way implying sexual acts of X(twitter)’s former CEO, Linda Yaccarino. It’s almost as if Grok was intentionally trained to be racist and misogynistic. Meta AI recently had a leak where a 200 page document revealed how it’s AI should be responding to children in something of a “grooming” narrative. The leaked document also contained explicitly racist guidance, stating that one race is dumber than another. It is sickening that leaders of this tech company secretly endorsed and encouraged this behavior in their AI model for the sake of “engagement” and profits.

I believe that we all want to keep our families and our children and communities safe. AI models need alignment and governance. In the current state of this nation, it feels like we don’t have a political voice or any political power in this “democracy”. It’s like the bad guys have won and nobody cares. I just don’t have an answer. I don’t know what we can do.