VentureBeat’s second special issue is nigh. Following our first special issue, Power in AI, this next one focuses on AI and security. Each special issue is a package of articles that explores a central topic from a variety of angles, from voices in industry, academia, and our newsroom.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, both AI and cybersecurity are nearly omnipresent in our daily lives at this point, and together they’re of increasing importance as our world becomes more connected, more “intelligent,” and more reliant on online or automated systems. Yet both can seem intractably technical, even for tech-savvy people. Because their significance is pitched against their opaqueness, each has an ominous gravity that only multiplies at the intersection of their Venn diagrams. The easy metaphor is that cybersecurity is a never ending, escalating arms race between good guys and bad guys, and the advent of AI is proverbial nuclear warfare.

Some of that’s true, but the reality is far more illuminating, nuanced, and accessible. There are huge threats posed by cybersecurity that AI technologies may amplify, and so cybersecurity experts need to employ them to protect us — and they are. In this issue, we’ll discuss how the threats are sometimes more sophisticated than ever, but often not. We’ll learn that even as attack and defense systems are more supercharged by technology than ever, the need for human expertise becomes more imperative, not less. And we’ll see that some of the seemingly most onerous threats, like deepfakes and the increasing presence of AI-powered cameras, have practical and political solutions.

Cybersecurity is a battlefield, and AI is creating new fronts in that war, with new weapons and means of defense. But in this special issue, we took a less charged approach, pulling from dozens of interviews with vendors and researchers to understand what’s really going on with AI and security and how we should think about it.

Because after all, even with the added layer of AI technologies, in security there’s nothing new under the sun, or at least very little. It remains an endless cycle of emerging technology that begets both threats and defenses. That’s simultaneously frightening and reassuring.

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