What’s real? What’s fake? Who knows anymore?

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