Dont bank on Britains foppish, lazy elites to save us from deep fakery – The Guardian
Technological advance is updating the motto of the 12th-century Assassins. Whereas the Ismaili sect said: Nothing is true, everything is permitted, the malicious, embittered, mentally disturbed and pornographically minded will soon make every truth a lie and every lie true.
We did not reach fake news saturation with the Brexit referendum and the Trump presidential campaign. We have barely tipped our toe in the dark waters. Artificial intelligence will allow smartphone users to generate synthetic voices and images that reach a Hollywood level of special effects at next to no cost and with minimum effort. If your enemies have video of you, they can make you appear in a porn scene so authentic only you will know its false. If they have a recording of your voice, they can have you mouthing racist slogans that could get you fired. Some are already doing it. Deep fake tools, such as FakeApp, are the beginning of an explosion in online lying that makes fake news indistinguishable from real.
Because we trust video as the most reliable part of our shared reality, we are likely to believe fakes initially or if it suits us and will go on believing until trust in a shared reality finally shatters. Jordan Peterson may not be a thinker all readers reach for, but when he launched a legal action in 2019 against a website that allowed users to generate believable audio of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say, he gave a warning thats worth remembering. How are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?
To give you a bearing on where we are heading, watch the wriggles of the US right as it manoeuvres to downplay the death of George Floyd. At the end of June, one Winnie Heartstrong, a Republican candidate in Missouri, produced a dossier alleging that the video of his killing was a deep fake made up of composites and face swaps. Although Twitter and Facebook, the truths willing executioners, have found an audience for fantasies that George Floyd is not dead or that George Soros is behind the Black Lives Matter protests , its fair to say that even they could not make Heartstrongs heartless conspiracism take off.
Nina Schick invites you to imagine the world in five years time. By then, we will be so used to synthetically generated propaganda that millions will find any claim plausible and it will seem no more than sensible scepticism to refuse to acknowledge the real.
Schicks Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse is a short, sharp book that hits you like a punch in the stomach. She witnessed first hand the ability of Vladimir Putins Russia to manufacture reality during its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and understands the consequences of the triumph of the Putin worldview. Unlike their 20th-century predecessors, dictatorial forces do not try to fool their peoples that they are creating a paradise on Earth the workers state, the 1,000-year Reich. Putinism in its broadest sense convinces the people that it doesnt matter if strongmen lie because everything is a lie, the system is rigged, democracy is a sham and all the news you hear that makes you doubt is a fraud. We may be liars, they concede, but so is everyone else and at least we lie for you. They offer hell on Earth instead of heaven on Earth and insist that only fools believe that the Earth can be made better.
Deep fake technology gives not only Russia but China, which is moving into information warfare as it tries to cover up its culpability for Covid-19, their most powerful tools yet. Advertisers will turn to it. So will criminals as they impersonate CEOs and persuade companies to hand over fortunes.
Many women can explain the future because they have already confronted deep fakery in their private lives. Even Hollywood stars have found they lack the resources to stop the distribution of synthetically generated pornographic films depicting them. Its a useless pursuit sighed Scarlett Johansson after her lawyers had tried and failed to protect her image. She went on to warn that any woman could become a target of amateur pornographers as the web became a vast wormhole of darkness.
Traditional defences of freedom of speech that I have long subscribed to are inadequate. You can say that war, colonialism, fascism and communism happened without the help of the web and we should calm down. Unfortunately, the speed of technological change is an argument against complacency. There were almost four centuries between the invention of the printing press in Europe and the development of photography in the 1830s and societies could adjust. There are 29 years between the oldest web page going up in 1991 and 4.57 billion people being online in 2020.
The need for government to adopt radical policies is obvious. But there is the urgent question of whether we can trust government and not only in dictatorships, where the state is the major source of fake news. Schick, like so many writers, concentrates on Trumps America and I cant find it in myself to blame them for being drawn to that moronic extravaganza. Yet I think we should be more frightened of the British elite. Its foppish laziness and abject cowardice exceeds anything on offer in Washington. A country whose security services were too frightened to investigate Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, whose civil service is stuffed with political appointees and whose TV regulators tear up their own impartiality rules to allow Putins propaganda station a licence, cannot protect the individual or society from the coming age of deep fakery.
As phoneys themselves, they will pretend to, of course. But theyll be faking it.
Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
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Dont bank on Britains foppish, lazy elites to save us from deep fakery - The Guardian