Hold your people close
Over the next few years, I think many people will find themselves in trouble because of how AI gets used against them, and I suspect the trouble will arrive more often than most expect. My own answer is a simple one. Keep your face off the internet where you can, stay clear of anything that could make you vulnerable to blackmail, and spend your time with the people you love, protecting them.
Behind that advice sits an idea about difficulty. For most of history, people were safe from most harms because harming them was expensive. A convincing forgery took skill, a scam at scale took organisation, and a threat carried out in person took nerve, so the cost of an attack filtered out most of the people who might have wished to make one. Much of what we call ordinary security was inconvenience working on our behalf. Because that friction was always present, it went largely unnoticed, in the way people rarely think about the air until it thins.
AI removes that cost. Intent was always common while capability was scarce, and the scarcity is what kept the world as safe as it was. Once capability reaches anyone with a grudge and a free afternoon, the pool of possible attackers grows to include people who would previously have stayed in the category of the merely resentful. The pool of possible victims grows with it. An attack that costs very little can be aimed at a schoolteacher or a teenager as easily as at a public figure, and the reassuring question of why anyone would bother with me loses its force, since bothering has become cheap. Defence remains expensive, and that asymmetry is the practical core of the problem.
Evidence changes as well. For a long time, seeing was a reliable route to believing, and a great deal of social life rested on that link: courts, journalism, family memory, the simple habit of trusting a voice on the phone. Once any image, voice or document can be fabricated, the link weakens. A fake only needs to be believable to the one person who fears it, so it never has to survive scrutiny from the wider world. The same weakness works in the other direction too, because a genuine record can now be dismissed as fabricated, and the existence of forgeries lowers the value of everything authentic.
This places the real vulnerability inside the person being targeted. The attacker needs fear, and the fabricated file is only a way of delivering it. Blackmail is a peculiar transaction in which the victim supplies most of the cost, since the threat gets its power from what the victim expects other people to think, feel and do. A fake photograph harms nobody until someone believes it, and the belief that matters most is often the victim’s own prediction of how the people closest to them would respond.
If safety once came from the world being difficult to exploit, it must now come from a person being difficult to hurt. I see two layers to this.
When power becomes cheap, character and community become the scarce resources.
The outer layer is exposure. A face is more than an image, since it is the most direct form of identity a person has, and every photograph, recording and public post turns some part of that identity into raw material that others can copy, reshape and redistribute. Whatever is shared leaves the sender’s control the moment it is shared, and the internet remembers with a persistence that no human memory shares. A person who offers less of themselves publicly gives an attacker less to work with, and also keeps a certain freedom, because a life that is harder to read is harder to imitate. Complete withdrawal is unrealistic, since copies of what has already been shared sit beyond anyone’s reach, so this layer reduces the risk and leaves some of it in place. It is still worth doing, because a smaller supply of material limits what can be forged.
Verification belongs to this layer as well, and it takes a philosophical form. When the senses stop being reliable witnesses, trust has to move from what is perceived to what is shared. A model can imitate a voice, yet it can only guess at what a family alone knows. A private word agreed in advance, a habit of calling back on a familiar number, or a memory that only two people hold becomes a stronger proof of identity than any face or voice. Relationships turn into the most reliable form of authentication, and the private remains the hardest thing to forge.
The inner layer is fragility, and I suspect it matters more. Blackmail depends on shame, secrecy and isolation, and each of them rests on a belief about how others will respond. Shame assumes rejection, secrecy assumes that telling will make things worse, and isolation keeps the person from testing either assumption. The blackmailer is really selling a prediction of abandonment, and a family that answers a confession with understanding falsifies that prediction before the threat can do any work. A person who can say that someone is threatening them with a fake photograph, and who expects to hear thank you for telling me, has removed the lever before anyone reaches for it.
The same reasoning applies to genuine leaks, and it points to something about how communities behave. When fakes are everywhere, even a real image can be doubted, so a person who is calm and supported gives a blackmailer very little to hold. A community that meets exposure with suspicion or contempt hands the attacker an ally, whereas one that meets it with generosity takes the power away. Extending the benefit of the doubt to each other therefore becomes a form of collective defence, and it costs only a willingness to listen before judging.
Technical defences will eventually be bypassed, so I think the most dependable protection is trust inside a family, and that trust grows from time spent together and from being the person others can tell anything. Attention is a scarce resource that no model can produce on anyone’s behalf, and it is the raw material of being known well. A person who is known deeply is difficult to impersonate and difficult to shame, and protecting the people you love is mostly made of small, repeated acts of presence rather than any single dramatic measure. I feel that being around the people you love and protecting them is the best thing anyone can do with their time, and I am honoured to do it for my own loved ones.