On January 23rd 1812, a group of artisans stormed in a textile workshop in Nottingham (UK). Armed with hammers, they smashed the knitting machines that could produce goods 100 times faster than by hand. Most of them were arrested, sentenced to death and hanged at York Castle. They were Luddites , a movement of highly skilled textile artisans that in early XIX century were protesting against the increasing use of machines operated by unskilled workers. The fear of machines taking our jobs is nothing new; and we can see the exact same thing happening now amplified by Hollywood movies, which generate a rather negative aura around robots. However, Artificial Intelligence is already bringing huge growth from the new types of goods, services and innovations that this technology enables. Indeed, Gartner [1] estimates that AI will generate $2.9 trillion in business value in 2021. Does it mean that our jobs will be safe? Not at all. Artificial Intelligence will definitely take many of o
In 2014, a 28-year-old American researcher called Ian Goodfellow published a paper called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that presented a powerful technique to generate brand new images (i.e., human faces) with Artificial Intelligence. Goodfellow's idea got a lot of attention from the academic and industry communities and new research papers followed improving the state of the art and, as it can be seen in the images below, the perceived quality of the human faces that GANs generated. Needless to say that none of these six people actually exists. However, for the last three ones, only a skilled computer forensic would be able to detect the deception. GANs are making a tremendous positive impact in different domains, such as healthcare or in creative industries. Unfortunately, malicious applications of this apparently harmless technique are emerging and posing a thread to our personal and even national security. Scams. Deep Learning has become a gold mine for crimin