JOURNAL ENTRY #2

One thing that stood out to me from our discussions about deepfakes and phishing this last week is how much deception has changed with technology, while the psychology behind it has stayed surprisingly similar. Before this class, I mostly thought of deepfakes as the funny things I would see on social media, like cats dancing or celebrities doing things they obviously never did. Most of those are easy to recognize as fake, but I have also seen some that are surprisingly close to reality. Our discussion in class made me think more about how many different ways deepfakes could actually be used beyond social media. Even though the major AI chatbots have started putting more restrictions around what they will generate, there are always new AI tools being created that make it possible to get around those limitations. 

Also on the topic of phishing, I got an SMS about a FedEx delivery over the weekend, which was especially funny because I had actually ordered something from Amazon around the same time. Even with that coincidence, I immediately knew it was fake because it had several of the warning signs we discussed in our presentation. What I found more interesting was how easily that same message could have worked on someone who was expecting a package and was not paying as much attention. The technology itself was not particularly sophisticated, but the timing and context could make the scam convincing. That reminded me of the case we presented in class on Thursday, which I liked because it did not really depend on technology at all. The people involved put a lot of thought into their plan and relied heavily on human trust and assumptions. In some ways, that was more interesting to me than a highly technical scam because it showed that you do not necessarily need advanced technology to manipulate someone.

I also found myself thinking about how much psychology is involved in all of these examples. Things like authority, urgency, familiarity, and our tendency to trust information that fits what we already expect can make people much easier to manipulate. That seems especially relevant with phishing because the scam does not have to be perfect. It just has to feel believable long enough for someone to act before thinking about whether something is actually legitimate. Deepfakes seem like an extension of the same idea. If seeing and hearing something has traditionally been enough for us to believe it, what happens when those things can be convincingly fabricated? I am interested to see how we continue to connect these technological forms of deception to the more traditional con artists we have discussed because, despite all of the new technology, a lot of the underlying tactics seem to come back to the same thing: understanding how people think and what makes them willing to believe something.

Comments

  1. williams.dan76September 15, 2026 at 6:38 AM

    This is a great blog post, thanks. I appreciate your discussions about how phishing keeps changing but not the psychology behind the scams. I thought this was quite interesting. I wish
    i knew more about that psychology. I need to do some research in this area. I know phishing scams have triggers to get emotional responses from people, and once the emotions control thought, we are all liable to let down our guards. I also think it will be interesting to consider how traditional con men are adapting to the new technologies. It's like an arms race, though. The more sophisticated the scams, the sophisticated the prevention strategies will become.

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