Week 3 Journal

This week I was incredibly busy and was reminded the value of good rest. While working on our presentation on deepfakes, I was surprised to learn how easy it is for people to create them. While I had done some image creation with AI for a class during my freshman year, I had not realized how much the tools had advanced in such a short period of time. I was also shocked by the actual number of sexualized deepfakes created with Grok's Image Edit feature at the beginning of this year. While I had read several news articles about it, I had not fully comprehended the scale of images being produced. Additionally, I was astonished at just how much money companies have lost or almost lost to scams involving AI. I did not realize that scammers could simulate video calls until learning about the Arup incident. I felt the same way when we watched the video on Thursday during the phishing presentation about how Facebook and Google were tricked with the deceptive transfer requests. I had two other presentation this week in which I learned some cool things. The first presentation was over the history of my hometown. I learned that the park bunker that my friends and I had thought was a nuclear shelter from World War II was actually used to store the chemicals they used to make bombs for that same war. My last presentation this week was over an article testing if HIV fusion inhibitor drugs could have the same effects in coronaviruses (COVID, MERS, etc). They used a really interesting technique in which they put a viral protein on a plate and had the drug flow over it. They measured the rate that it bound to and detached from the protein to determine its binding affinity. This week was busy, but I learned a lot of fun things which made the stress sort of worth it.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76September 15, 2026 at 6:12 AM

    Great blog post. You made my day when you wrote, "I learned some cool things." Thanks for that. I appreciate the mention of all you learned during your deep fakes research. The technology is scary. But learning about your hometown and HIV inhibitors are equally valuable lessons.

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