Artificial intelligence has sparked concern about the many ways new tools can be used for fraudulent purposes; from data breaches to phishing attacks, where scammers trick people into sharing passwords or sending money to an unknown account, cybercrime is already one of the most common forms of crime. The victims of cybercrime are numerous worldwide. We are, in part, victims of our own digital success, especially with the adoption of new technologies such as online shopping and mobile banking services, activities that cybercriminals are keen to exploit. As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, these criminals are given more ways to deceive us.

Many exciting developments are being made in human imitation. ElevenLabs has built and released a tool that can almost duplicate any accent in any language. You can go to its website and have its pre-trained models read data using the fast-paced tones of a New Yorker named "Sam".

Synthesia (a platform for generating synthetic media) allows its customers to create new salespersons. You can create a realistic video of an artificially created person speaking any language, promoting your product, or providing customer support. These videos are incredibly lifelike, but the person does not exist.

It's ironic that human imitation, for better or worse, is one of the first primary uses of artificial intelligence. Alan Turing, the spiritual father of modern computing, devised the Turing Test, originally named the "Imitation Game", to assess the ability of AI to trick a human into believing it's real. Passing this test quickly became a benchmark for the success of an AI developer. Now that anyone can create synthetic people at the click of a button, we need a Turing Test to determine who is real and who is created.

Fortunately, there are already some services to address this challenge. New initiatives are being launched to provide users with more insights into the source of the content they receive and how it was created. In the end, much greater efforts must be made to raise public awareness about the increasing sophistication of cybercriminals, and what is now possible using artificial intelligence.