How AI can now copy handwriting. Is it a reason to worry?

Artificial Intelligence continues to break barriers.Adding to people’s worries about deepfakes and their voices being closed is news that now even their handwriting could be replicated.Researchers at Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) say they have created a technology that can mimic someone’s handwriting.But what do we know? And how does it work?Let’s take a closer look:As per Bloomberg, researchers at MBZUAI, which describes itself as the world's first AI university, employed a transformer model.This is a kind of neural network designed to study context and meaning in sequential data.

The network can mimic handwriting with just a few paragraphs of sample material.

The MBZUAI team has been given a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office.“Automatic handwritten text generation can be beneficial for people having disabilities or injuries that prevent them from writing,” the patent states as per The National. “There may be a case where a person wishes to write a note in a foreign language in a manner that appears that the foreign language writing is authentic and in their own writing style.”The programme, which has not been released yet, could conceivably allow the wounded to write again without ever up a pen."From decoding doctors' handwriting to crafting personalized advertising, the potential of this development is huge," said Rao Muhammad Anwer, also an assistant professor of computer vision at MBZUAI told Bloomberg.The technology could also be used to produce a large amount of synthetic data to improve how other AI models process handwriting.As per Bloomberg, the model can learn and write in English.It has also had some success in doing in so in French.But the team has not successfully been able to make it replicate Arabic.As per The National, mimicking handwriting in Arabic is more difficult due to “the way Arabic letters are connected in handwritten script”.Salman Khan, associate professor of computer vision at MBZUAI, told the newspaper “the result of the generated handwriting was quite good.”“They could not distinguish the mimicked handwriting from the actual handwriting, and it was satisfying to see that kind of validation of the performance.”

However, the creators of the technology remain mindful of its potential for misuse.

"We'll have to create public awareness and develop tools to combat forgery," said Hisham Cholakkal, an assistant professor for computer vision at MBZUAI. "It's like developing an anti-virus for a virus."“Handwriting represents a person’s identity, so we are thinking carefully about this before deploying it,” said Rao told The National.The university itself is relatively new.As per The National, it opened in 2020 after being announced in 2019.Eric Xing, MBZUAI president, told The National, “I am very proud that we have achieved so much in just four years of operation – with a host of milestones yet to come,” he said.“We are actively training the next generation of AI specialists who will contribute to and even elevate the level of knowledge and excellence in this important area of human development.”With inputs from agencies