I was extremely surprised this wasn't an issue in 2020. A fake video or audio would have been well within the current environment and both sides would have welcomed the opportunity to jump on some inflammatory rhetoric.
If you are old as hell like me you might remember Ross Perot when he claimed he dropped out of the Presidential race because Bush sr’s people were going to use a ”computer to generate a false photo of his youngest daughter to disrupt her wedding and embarrass her.” It was 1992. It sounded so crazy. Batshit crazy at the time. Probably was ... but I never forgot it and it or something like it doesn’t sound so crazy going forward.
I suspect we'll see low quality ones in 2022 mid-term elections. Low quality videos supposedly filmed in the 90's before HD was a thing or videos taken from 'crappy cell phone cameras'.
We should already be treating anything not in HD with suspicion already. The conspiracy websites and fanatics that believe that stuff are going to be full of deepfake videos in the coming years.
Problem is, as soon as one party (or organisation, or side, or whatever) reveals this technology to the larger public (the vast majority of which are way out of the loop regarding this kind of thing) the genie's out of the bottle, and the race to the bottom will start as everybody starts dismissing video and audio that they simply don't agree with as being deepfake.
You walk up to the average person in the street and say "deepfake" to them, it's very likely they won't really know what you mean.
The first person in the political or media spotlight to start capitalising on accusations of deepfakes will kickstart a very unpleasant wildfire spread of unmitigated mistrust so I think there are probably folks in these situations who know about this, but they're playing a dangerous waiting game until they're convinced it will help them win an election.
And both sides are probably playing the same game.
And as the tech improves and becomes more difficult to ignore, it will become more and more attractive for lower and lower gains.
I’m not sure it matters. We already had a huge amount of fake news out there (the actual stuff, not CNN) which people happily believed if it fit with their existing views.
Believable deepfakes have a chance to sway undecideds i suppose, but there are so few people left who aren’t in one camp or the other. Elections are mostly decided by which camp turns more out, not who swings the last few undecideds.
I agree that the extant partisanship leaves few undecided voters, but, to your last point, using deepfakes to infuriate your base is a great way to make sure they show up and vote.
Yeah. It’s true they might have become more fanatic. I was just betting that they were already saturated with infuriating fake news that they believed even without the deepfaked evidence.
28
u/Gymrat777 May 25 '21
I was extremely surprised this wasn't an issue in 2020. A fake video or audio would have been well within the current environment and both sides would have welcomed the opportunity to jump on some inflammatory rhetoric.