Author: Chris Catalano

We live in a rapidly evolving political climate where “fake news”, misinformation, and downright lies seem to be more prevalent each day. The most terrifying version of this newscycle has been created by artificial intelligence, called Deepfakes. Citizens seem to be trusting the “news” less and less and we now live in an age where we don’t rely on reporting as much, as we have the ability to hear information straight from our elected officials. But what if the person we are seeing speak isn’t that person at all? What if after hours and hours of studying video recording of a person we can now create artificial versions of that person barely indistinguishable from reality. 

In this smartphone era we live in, the amount of audio and video recording we do of ourselves and our friends has reached an asinine level and Gen Z’ers are only going to expound on that amount. Popular phone applications such as Instagram and TikTok have come under scrutiny for collecting our data in order to use target marketing to attack our consumerist tendencies. What if the target isn’t just our tendencies, but our voices and mannerisms. I’m sure most of us have had unflattering photos or videos posted on the internet, but the generation that is constantly being recorded also has the technology to manipulate the recordings- we are heading to a terrifying future. As Chesney and Citron put it in Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War: The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics, “These dynamics will make social media fertile ground for circulating deepfakes, with potentially explosive implications for politics.”1

A deepfake video can appear of a senator claiming to admit to a crime, a sitting president declaring war, or a prominent scientist claiming climate change isn’t real and that may be the only spark needed to lead to disaster. We are not far from that reality. We currently have real videos of our president and politicians saying horrible things, and their supporters will deny they’ve been said even though I can watch it with my two eyes. The point is, the narrative will be whatever an individual wants it to be and deepfakes have an ungodly amount of power to shift a narrative. In a January New York Times article Facebook said it would remove videos altered by artificial intelligence in ways meant to mislead viewers2, but it may be impossible to regulate and once information is disseminated it can never be put back in its holster.

 

1. Chesney, Robert, and Danielle Citron. “Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War: The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 98, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 147–155. EBSCOhost.
2. McCabe, D. (2020, January 8). Facebook Says It Will Ban ‘Deepfakes.’ Https://Www.Nytimes.Com/#publisher. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-says-it-will-ban-deepfakes.html?referringSource=articleShare

Why do we meddle in places that don’t want to be meddled with? It seems much of the United States foreign policy is based on demanding other nations to act multilaterally while the US acts unilaterally. An article published today in the New York Times, “Joe Biden’s China Journey”, recalls a graduation speech Joe Biden made at Fudan University in Shanghai in 2001. Biden asks, “The students of Tiananmen Square, were they patriots or traitors to the People’s Republic of China?” The response he received from one of the students was simple, yet remarkably profound. The student answered, “The students of Tiananmen were heroes of the People’s Republic of China. Senator, change will come to China. But it will be we, the students of Newton, who determine the pace and the direction of that change, and not you or anyone else working on the banks of the Potomac.” 1

In that same trip in 2001, Senator Joe Biden, as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, welcomed China’s entry to the World Trade Organization. While on his trip to China, Biden states, “The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules.”1 Biden’s trip at the time was seen as a great success by bringing China into the fold- getting them adopt multilateral policies and to “play by the rules.” As the common saying goes, ‘keep your friends close, and you enemies closer.’ While I would not classify China as a true enemy of the U.S it is evident that Biden knows the potential of that is on the rise. As Vice President, Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping repeatedly to establish “a competitive relationship with China without it being a bellicose relationship, without it being a relationship based on force.”1 While I personally may be a bit of a pacifist, it seems like having a trade war evolve into a nuclear war is a futile path. I tend to agree most with one of Biden’s top advisers, Jake Sullivan, who says the United States “should put less focus on trying to slow China down and more emphasis on trying to run faster ourselves.”1

 The idea of not being first has become unacceptable to Americans, but I always question, does it really matter? Does a country having higher GDP numbers affect the lives of everyday Americans who simply want to make it to the end of the week and have food on their table? Does spending billions of dollars flying jets over boats in the South China sea put that food on the table? Fareed Zakaria points out in “The Self-Destruction of American Power: Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment” that the American imperium is dead. It died when we ignored the Powell Doctrine and entered endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were supposed to be swift victories.2 Does anyone truly believe a war with China would be swift, let alone victorious? 

1. Wong, E. (2020, September 6). Joe Biden’s China Journey. Https://Www.Nytimes.Com/#publisher. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/us/politics/biden-china.html

Zakaria, Fareed. “The Self-Destruction of American Power: Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 98, no. 4, July-Aug. 2019, p. 10+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link-gale-com.remote.baruch.cuny.edu/apps/doc/A588990634/AONE?u=cuny_baruch&sid=AONE&xid=bc365eec. Accessed 6 Sept. 2020.