Deepfakes. Depending on how tech or politically literate you are, you may have heard of these. They’ve got enormous destructive potential. And they’re more and more prevalent.
What Is A Deepfake?
A “deepfake” is a video (or photo) where careful tech editing has been used to make it appear a person is saying or doing something that they haven’t actually done. Let me illustrate with an example: People sometimes put the faces of celebrities on the bodies of porn stars in deepfake videos.
Maybe your kid brother was taping magazine cutout heads of Jennifer Aniston onto Hustler magazine since the 90s. What is one big difference between this and that?
It’s mostly in the level of sophistication. Deepfake videos go through a very complex process. Security and fraud website CSO explains it this way: “two machine learning (ML) models duke it out. One ML model trains on a data set and then creates video forgeries, while the other attempts to detect the forgeries. The forger creates fakes until the other ML model can’t detect the forgery.” (1)
Fake News And The Deepfake
We live in an era of fake news. A world where a politician can tweet one thing and say another in a press conference years, weeks, days, or even hours later. A time where both Democrats and Republicans can do something, get caught on tape, then pretend it didn’t happen. There used to be truth and objectivity. We used to be able to point to an event and say “that happened.” Maybe we’d disagree on the social or political implications. But there was an objective truth.
That time is done.
Deepfakes are the next evolution of being unable to trust our figures in leadership. Is that new, scandalous video real? Is it the creation of machine learning models? Will people pretend that real photos or videos are faked, if the footage is inconvenient to their narrative?
The Rise Of Deepfake
According to a July 2019 article by Deeptrace Labs, “deepfake videos almost doubl[ed] over the last seven months to 14,678. This increase is supported by the growing commodification of tools and services that lower the barrier for non-experts to create deepfakes.” Founded in 2018, Deeptrace Labs is dedicated to watching the growth and development of deepfake media. More and more fraudulent videos, and more and more ease of creation is worrisome. How long can we trust our media? (2)
Real-World Impact
The Deeptrace lab report also states that in Gabon and Malaysia, “deepfakes linked to an alleged government cover-up and a political smear campaign. One of these cases was related to an attempted military coup, while the other continues to threaten a high- profile politician with imprisonment.” Sure, such tactics haven’t made their way into mainstream Western media yet. Perhaps our news is too sophisticated. Perhaps there are too many technologically-aware people here. But regardless, it is a concerning indication of possibilities. (2)
Who’s Vulnerable?
Maybe you’ll be safe from falling victim to a deepfake. Maybe, with the rise of awareness, most of us will be. But people see what they want to see. If the video tells you what you want to hear, will you question it?
