AI can now copy your handwriting. We’re concerned.

AI can apparently copy handwriting now.
Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nothing is safe from AI copying it.

Researchers at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi say they developed an AI tool that can pretty closely copy a person’s handwriting. The researchers said that the model needed just a few paragraphs of writing to be trained.

“[People] could not distinguish the mimicked handwriting from the actual handwriting, and it was satisfying to see that kind of validation of the performance,” researcher Salman Khan said in a press release.

AI has proven relatively capable of copying voices and creating images out of whole cloth. Of course, handwriting was next up. Right now the model is primarily focused on mimicking English writing and is not yet available to the public. The researchers were recently granted a patent for the tool.

The team also acknowledged that the potential for forgery and other nefarious uses was very real.

“We are very cautious about it because it could be misused,” researcher Rao Muhammad Anwer said in the press release. “Handwriting represents a person’s identity, so we are thinking carefully about this before deploying it.”

Researchers on the team told Bloomberg in an interview that they’d work on tools to prevent forgery and that their invention could also be used to interpret illegible writing — looking at you, doctors everywhere.

Tim Marcin is a culture reporter at Mashable, where he writes about food, fitness, weird stuff on the internet, and, well, just about anything else. You can find him posting endlessly about Buffalo wings on Twitter at @timmarcin.

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