Name: Could deepfakes weaken democracy? | The Economist
Uploaded: 2019-10-23T11:05:39.000Z
Duration: 5 min 50 s
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I genuinely love the process of manipulating people online for money.

We just want to predict your future behaviours.

Synthesised content created using artificial intelligence.

Deepfakes will make for even more complicated arguments about what is fake news and what is real.

And if seeing is no longer believing, the very real question is could deepfakes weaken democracy?

Democracy just doesn't work if people don't believe in it.

So the deepfake artworks used artificial intelligence and machine-learning technologies to kind of hack the bodies if you like, of famous celebrity influencers.

Bill Posters is the artist behind these deepfake videos known as the Spectre Project.

Spectre is almost too powerful to comprehend.

Two of the main questions we wanted to explore with the Spectre Project is what does it feel like when our personal data is used in unexpected ways by powerful tech companies and how, as a result, can that change our understandings of today.

To test Facebook's response, Bill posted the deepfake videos on Instagram a social-media platform owned by Facebook.

The company downgraded the videos' visibility.

Spectre showed me how to manipulate you into sharing intimate data about yourself and all those you love for free.

But that didn't stop this fake clip of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg going viral.

That showed the potential for spreading disinformation online through deepfakes.

A danger that's likely to increase as long as tech companies and politicians remain unsure how to deal with it.

The power of deepfakes is an area of great concern whilst these technologies exist in what is essentially a regulatory black hole.

Image manipulation is already exploited by autocratic regimes.

It's a dark art that goes back to Joseph Stalin who made his enemies disappear.

AI today is capable of making deepfake videos like this where comedian Bill Hader morphs into Tom Cruise.

As the technology advances the danger is that deepfakes will be used to mislead voters in democratic countries.

If you take away those tools that enable us to be able to sort out what's real from what's not, you make very poor decisions.

Aviv Ovadya is the founder of Thoughtful Technology Project.

He worries about another problem that deepfakes could be used as an excuse to help politicians escape scrutiny.

You have the corrupt politician being able to say, "oh yeah that video of me—that was fake."

That brings us into a world where people won't know what they can trust.

He believes the ultimate threat from deepfakes could be that more and more people opt out of democratic politics.

Reality apathy is when it's so hard to make sense of what's happening, people just sort of give up.

A group of scientists at Cambridge University are having a go.

They have developed a computer game to teach people how to spot disinformation.

So in the game people essentially step into the shoes of a fake news producer, and you build your way up to a fake news empire by spreading fake content online.

Dr Sander van der Linden, the game's designer, believes it will help people to distinguish fact from fiction.

So your goal is to get as many followers as possible while maintaining your online credibility.

And the first badge in the game is about impersonating other people online.

And of course one example that we've talked about is deepfakes.

So in the game we test people before and after, and at the beginning we found that people are duped by a lot of these techniques, but once they played the game they've become resistant and are able to identify them later on.

Dr van der Linden's team have drawn inspiration from preventative medicine in their hunt to cure fake news.

So just as you inject someone with a severely weakened dose of a virus to trigger antibodies in the immune system, you can do the same with information.

People can essentially create mental antibodies and become immune against fake news.

And essentially everyone is their own bullshit detector.

Today I'm president, not because I'm the greatest, though probably I am.

Deepfake technology means that faking videos is becoming as easy as faking words and photos.

Until people learn to look at video with a more critical eye, there's a danger that deepfakes could be used to undermine democracy.

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Could deepfakes weaken democracy? | The Economist

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