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- A team of inventors have received a patent from the US for an AI tool that can copy people's handwriting.
- It's able to produce text based off just a few paragraphs of a person's original handwriting.
- However, the team said they're being cautious because it can be misused for forgery.
AI can clone your voice, and create deepfake images, and it's soon going to come for your handwriting style too.
A team of researchers at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi have developed an AI system that can learn people's handwriting style and generate text that looks extremely similar to their handwriting, the university announced in a press release in December. The researchers used a vision transformer, which is a type of neural network that can understand context and meaning in systematic data such as the words in a sentence.
The technology only needs a few paragraphs of original handwriting to be trained.
The team were recently granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the tool which can help people who have injuries write without using a pen.
One of the inventors, Rao Muhammad Anwer, an assistant professor of computer vision, told Bloomberg in an interview that it can also be used to decode the famously illegible handwriting of doctors and even create personalized advertising.
The tool, which is not yet available to the public, can currently generate text in English, and some French, but producing handwritten text in Arabic is proving to be a more challenging task.
The inventors noted that the tool could be "misused" to forge people's handwriting so they're being very "cautious."
Anwer said in the release: "Handwriting represents a person's identity, so we are thinking carefully about this before deploying it."
"We'll have to create public awareness and develop tools to combat forgery," another inventor, Hisham Cholakkal, an assistant professor for computer vision at MBZUAI, said to Bloomberg. "It's like developing an anti-virus for a virus."
AI is being misused in various cases. People are taking advantage of AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to create deepfake images of celebrities. In one example, an image of Pope Francis wearing a stylish white puffer jacket and a bejeweled crucifix went viral on social media in March.
There have also been concerns about AI cloning people's voices. Actor Stephen Fry said in September that an AI system copied his voice from his narration of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter audiobooks and used it to create a documentary without his consent.
There have been various deepfake videos of celebrities and politicians, including one of Florida Governor Ron Desantis acting as Michael Scott in an episode of "The Office."