Greg's Corner

Could Deep Fakes ruin our world?

Recently, a video was distributed on social media od Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that made it look and sound like she was slurring her speech. While the video was determined to be fake it was put out by someone who supposedly did not support Pelosi’s politics. However, with politics being what it is in this country today there were people who believed it to be real. While this particular video was made using simple editing tricks of an actual video it does bring up the matter of what will happen when ‘Deep Fakes’ become more prevalent in our society and media.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term Deep Fake, it refers to a process where someone can take a single image or video and by using an AI Assisted program it can turn the original video into just about anything the fabricator wanted. For example, if you wanted to make it look like a beloved celebrity say that they enjoyed stealing candy from babies you probably could. Now take that same process and imagine it being used against candidates running for President. Potentially deep fakes could be used to make it look like any candidate look like they were saying or doing something completely detrimental to their campaign.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLoI9hAX9dw%5D

The deep fakes could become so commonplace that we wouldn’t be able to tell what was real and what wasn’t. If someone were to commit a heinous act caught on video’ all they would need to say is that the video was a deep fake and scores of people would believe them. Thankfully, the technology is not there yet where a deep fake is indistinguishable from the real thing but it could only be a matter of time before it is. When technologies are used by bad actors, it usually takes law enforcement and government some time to catch up before designing the tools needed to fight them.