THE FAKE ISSUE
Realty Bytes
The Real Threat of Deepfake Videos of events that didn’t really happen can overturn elections and sabotage companies By Jeff Joseph
or decades, graphics geeks and the digital literate have been using platforms like Adobe Photoshop and After Effects to alter photos and videos. They do it to promote a cause, advertise a business, campaign for a politician, get a laugh with a visual gag or put a celebrity’s face on a porn star’s body. Until recently, the process required specialized skills and took considerable time, and the results were obviously fake. Anyone could tell with the naked eye that the images were doctored. But that’s changing. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is lowering the cost of fake videos, reducing the time it takes to make them and
F
eliminating the need for special skills to manipulate the digital images. At the same time, the fakes are reaching a level of realism that tricks the eye and the mind. Take the example of fake videos of politicians delivering speeches. Viewers feel they’re seeing and hearing the candidates say things they have never really said. It’s happening because AI captures facial characteristics from thousands of images and puts them together to create a video that’s totally convincing. Welcome to the world of deepfakes. The term (a mashup of deep learning and fake) and its underlying technology achieved notoriety when a Reddit user whose
handle was deepfakes published a series of real-looking fake celebrity pornographic videos in 2017. Fake found a new forum and, with the speed of Moore’s Law, deepfakes are becoming the latest existential threat to political, cultural and privacy norms. The threat of deepfakes has already expanded beyond victimizing female celebrities in fake pornography. It’s moved into corporate espionage, market manipulation and political interference—presenting a grave new challenge for the Authentication Economy. Last May, Florida Senator Marco Rubio warned the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that bad actors
PHOTOGRAPHS: BILL_POSTERS_UK INSTAGRAM
The pornography industry latches onto new ideas quickly, particularly when it comes to technology. Porn pioneered internet-based video streaming services a year before CNN and a decade before YouTube. But porn’s latest foray into technology could be as disturbing as it is disruptive.
THESE ARE ALL FAKE A series of chillingly realistic fake videos depict everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Donald Trump uttering statements they would never really make. Their creator, U.K.-based former street artist Bill Posters, says he produces the fakes as his way of exploring and challenging propaganda.
20
luckbox | january 2020
2001-topics-deepfake.indd 20
12/20/19 2:50 PM
