The message is clear: fraud is no longer a low-effort operation. It’s sophisticated, context-aware, and increasingly personalized. These manipulations don’t require deep technical knowledge. Publicly available tools allow scammers to synthesize voice or text with minimal effort. In effect, the barrier to high-quality fraud has disappeared.

This early experiment set the philosophical and architectural precedent for decades of neural network research to come, despite falling into disrepute during the first AI winter. Its core idea, that pattern recognition could emerge from layered computation, would eventually reemerge, scaled and refined, in models like AlexNet.

But AI does not evolve in a vacuum. It is built, funded, and deployed by powerful actors, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI who shape its trajectory with corporate interests and opaque goals.