Main Body
Synthetic media: Deepfakes
“A deepfake is meant to cause an incongruence between expectation and perceived reality.” – Dobber et al.
Overview
This chapter is a continuation of last chapter’s exploration of purely AI-generated content. Deepfakes, however, combine existing real content with AI-generated media to create new content that appears to be representing a real person’s communication.
Here is a Bloomberg Quicktake that demonstrates what this looks like.
Naturally, there are concerns beyond using deepfakes as a form of entertainment. If deepfake technologies were used exclusively by Hollywood film effects specialists, perhaps these clips wouldn’t be too much cause for concern. (Do you recall how impressive it was in 1994 when Forrest Gump met President Kennedy and Kennedy’s speech was synthesized?).
However, deepfake software is freely available today and nearly anyone with a desire to make them can do so at minimal cost.
What does it mean when a single person can produce fake communication and impose asymmetrical chaos into our social and political well-being?
Below: A deepfake video experiment produced by Ethan Mollick, a leading researcher and writer in the area of AI and LLMs. Note that the clip includes AI-generated voice and picture in multiple languages.
Key Terms
The Liar’s Dividend: In the article “Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security,” the authors, Robert Chesney and Danielle Keats Citron, propose that the risk of deepfake media permeating society is not so much in the misleading perception posed by actual deepfake content but, instead, in the notion that even legitimate media could be synthetic. The “dividend” contained in the phrase refers to the benefit gained by powerful entities or individuals when the public does not know for certain whether any media is real, particularly when an individual denies culpability for behaviors recorded on video by claiming that the video was a fake.
Read more about the research conducted to measure the impact of deepfake media on human perception.
There are two examples worth exploring that demonstrate the undermining effect of deepfake videos on the perception of actual, non-fake video content:
- “GOP House candidate publishes 23-page report claiming George Floyd death was deepfake video” – A conspiracy claim that the George Floyd videos depicting his apprehension and death by police was faked.
- “A Military Coup in Gabon Inspired by a Potential Deepfake Video is Our Political Future” – The somewhat odd appearance of president Bongo of Gabon in a video address sparked a controversy by his opponents claiming that the video was a deepfake. The video was, in fact, authentic, though the president had experienced a stroke which altered his appearance.
What should you be focusing on?
Your goal this module is to assess the influence of deepfake media in the human effort to form reliable mental models of the real world. As you review the readings and m