The risks of AI misuse continued to grow this week — with a Bengaluru techie demonstrating how Google Nano Banana could be used to forge government documents. The popular image-generation tool now appears to be frequently employed for evil as netizens share ways to dupe businesses and deceive other people. Netizens sounded fresh alarm on Monday after a cautionary post revealed that the artificial intelligence site could generate hyper-realistic versions of PAN and Aadhaar cards.
Fake Aadhaar and PAN cards
“Nano Banana is good but that is also a problem. it can create fake identity cards with extremely high precision. The legacy image verification systems are doomed to fail. Sharing examples of the PAN and Aadhar card of an imaginary person,” the X user wrote.
The post included the ‘official’ government documents of one Twitterpreet Singh — replete with seemingly authentic details. And while some X users noted that there were “font issues” in the documents, it appeared overall a rather convincing dupe.
‘Serious issue for identity verification’
The post has since sparked widespread alarm with many on X opining that use of such government documents would soon become obsolete. Others noted that similar results had previously been achievable via careful editing or more recently through ChatGPT.
“It can become a serious issue for identity verification, since we are heavily relying on Aadhar and PAN. Issues in Identity Card generation that we spot can go overseen by people verifying it,” warned one X user.
“Scanning the QR on the Aadhar and actually verifying it will start becoming the norm soon because of this. And the new aadhar app also makes it easy for private hotels and places to verify an aadhar themselves,” wrote another.
“Thank you! Driving licence mein spelling ki mistake ho gyi hai ab theek ho jayega,” joked a third.
“ChatGPT has been able to do so since April. As discussed in that post, the main question is how did they get the training data for all these,” reminded a fourth.
