In Islamic eschatology, Al-Masih ad-Dajjal is a conniving figure who is said to trick people into following them. A covert messenger of false religion, Dajjal has been compared to many concepts in today’s world. Here, Kaleem Hussain looks at generative AI and online safety measures.
When major cataclysmic events unfold before our very eyes, such as natural disasters or wars across multiple regions around the world, we often hear that these are “signs of the end times” or that “the end is near.”
The human conscience begins to look for a default setting as it seeks to make sense of what is happening.
Imbued in the theological underpinnings of the Abrahamic faith traditions is the messiah who shall return towards “the end times.” Different names are ascribed to this mythical-apocalyptic proto-type, ranging from Dajjal to Anti-Christ, and for some he will be deemed to be their saviour whilst for others his appearance will be the catalyst for human devastation and destruction.
In an age where we are seeing the onset of what can be coined as the digital revolution with new transformative technologies such as Chat-GPT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will surpass what humanity experienced with the Industrial Revolution, key questions are being raised from a safeguarding and digital ethics prism as to how our current and future generations will embrace and adapt to this metamorphic matrix that is unfolding before our very eyes.
In the UK, the Online Safety Act (OSA) received Royal Assent on October 26th 2023 to tackle online harm. Whilst digital tools can be a force for good, there is the dystopian world of the “dark web”, where many criminals reside, which includes encrypted online content that is not indexed by conventional search engines. This is also intertwined through the advent of degenerative AI and deepfakes, deceitful scams via social engineering where bad actors seek to lure often impressionable and vulnerable individuals down dark trodden paths that leave long lasting psychological, financial, and even physical scars on the victims. In this digital hemisphere, it is imperative that protective measures are in place to safeguard individuals from such harms and attacks.
The OSA 2023 makes provisions for and in connection with the regulation by OFCOM of certain internet services in connection with communication offences; and for connected purposes.
The OSA 2023 sets out the key objectives of the Act:
This Act provides for a new regulatory framework which has the general purpose of making the use of internet services regulated by this Act safer for individuals in the United Kingdom.
To achieve that purpose, this Act (among other things) imposes duties which, in broad terms, require providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm (including risks which particularly affect individuals with a certain characteristic) from—
(i) illegal content and activity, and
(ii) content and activity that is harmful to children, and
(b) confers new functions and powers on the regulator, OFCOM.
(3) Duties imposed on providers by this Act seek to secure (among other things) that services regulated by this Act are—
(a) safe by design, and
(b) designed and operated in such a way that—
(i) a higher standard of protection is provided for children than for adults,
(ii) users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy are protected, and
(iii) transparency and accountability are provided in relation to those services.
Part 3 of the OSA 2023 lays out important information on the duty of care that is imposed on regulated user-to-user services and regulated search services requiring OFCOM to issue codes of practice relating to some of those duties. The duty of care relates to areas such as Content, Children and Fraudulent advertising.
It is certainly a welcome addition that “content that is harmful to children” is being given paramount importance in the new Act to protect them from these online harms.
The opportunities and risks that AI pose to our society were epitomised further when the UK Government recently held an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. The focus of the summit was to bring together international governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups, and experts in research, aiming to:
- Consider the risks of AI, especially of the frontier development
- Discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action.
A reader may ask at this juncture, what does all this digital transformation have to do with the term “Digital Dajjal”? — al-Dajjal in Arabic means “The Deceiver”. In Islamic eschatology, it refers to a false messianic figure who will come forth before the “end of times” and will be exterminated by Prophet Jesus in a place called Lod, a vicinity near modern day Tel-Aviv where the structural door and ancient compound still survives today.
Al-Dajjal is described as a one-eyed man with a ruddy face and curly hair — a physical human being. However, it is not uncommon to see scholars of theology and the Islamic tradition refer ab inito to the system that will materialise and manifest before his physical appearance — linking it at times to the subliminal one-eye marketing campaigns that we have now become accustomed to in contemporary popular culture.
As we transcend further into the digital transformation journey of AI, it will unravel many openings and opportunities which will be embraced by our common humanity at large. The risks of such rapid technological change, such as the increase in online harms, the deceptive deepfake holograms, paradigms and subversion of essential truth, or what is now often coined as living in a “post-truth world”, will need to be managed and mitigated via multiple defence mechanisms to protect our current and future generations from its negative currents.
For faith adherents, there are prescriptive protective prayers that observers can seek to recite as their defence mechanism to keep them immune from the headways of the digital dajjal onslaught. However, the ultimate reality and realisation of this eschatological manifestation resides within the corpus of Divine Providence.
Image courtesy of British Library Add. 7894
