In the video address (which is worth examining firsthand yourself), Bongo appears stiff and stilted, with unnatural speech and facial mannerisms. In an attempt to allay these concerns and reassert Bongo’s leadership over the country, his administration announced that he would give a nationwide televised address on New Years Day. Rumors were swirling that he was no longer healthy enough for office or even that he had died. In late 2018, Gabon's president Ali Bongo had not been seen in public for months. The most dramatic example of this comes from Gabon, a small country in central Africa. At least some viewers believed the speech was real.Įven more insidiously, the mere possibility that a video could be a deepfake can stir confusion and facilitate political deception regardless of whether deepfake technology has actually been used. Last month, a political group in Belgium released a deepfake video of the Belgian prime minister giving a speech that linked the COVID-19 outbreak to environmental damage and called for drastic action on climate change. Experts warn that these incidents are canaries in a coal mine. This risk is no longer just hypothetical: there are early examples of deepfakes influencing politics in the real world. In the words of Hani Farid, one of the world's leading experts on deepfakes: “If we can't believe the videos, the audios, the image, the information that is gleaned from around the world, that is a serious national security risk.” “Today.all you need is the ability to produce a very realistic fake video that could undermine our elections, that could throw our country into tremendous crisis internally and weaken us deeply.” “In the old days, if you wanted to threaten the United States, you needed 10 aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles,” U.S. In a recent report, The Brookings Institution grimly summed up the range of political and social dangers that deepfakes pose: “distorting democratic discourse manipulating elections eroding trust in institutions weakening journalism exacerbating social divisions undermining public safety and inflicting hard-to-repair damage on the reputation of prominent individuals, including elected officials and candidates for office.” In a world where even some uncertainty exists as to whether such clips are authentic, the consequences could be catastrophic.īecause of the technology’s widespread accessibility, such footage could be created by anyone: state-sponsored actors, political groups, lone individuals. soldiers committing atrocities against civilians overseas or of President Trump declaring the launch of nuclear weapons against North Korea. Imagine deepfake footage of a politician engaging in bribery or sexual assault right before an election or of U.S. It does not require much imagination to grasp the harm that could be done if entire populations can be shown fabricated videos that they believe are real. Deepfake pornography is almost always non-consensual, involving the artificial synthesis of explicit videos that feature famous celebrities or personal contacts.įrom these dark corners of the web, the use of deepfakes has begun to spread to the political sphere, where the potential for mayhem is even greater. As of September 2019, 96% of deepfake videos online were pornographic, according to the Deeptrace report.Ī handful of websites dedicated specifically to deepfake pornography have emerged, collectively garnering hundreds of millions of views over the past two years. The first use case to which deepfake technology has been widely applied- as is often the case with new technologies-is pornography. Society needs to act now to prepare itself. In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. “Nine months later, I’ve never seen anything like how fast they’re going. “In January 2019, deep fakes were buggy and flickery,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert. Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long. But the technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. While impressive, today's deepfake technology is still not quite to parity with authentic video footage-by looking closely, it is typically possible to tell that a video is a deepfake.
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