Misinformation Apocalypse

We are already living it. But it’s only just the start.

Misinformation is a bigger problem than people realize. In a few years or even months, we will not be able to distinguish the difference between real information and fake information.

A very recent example was the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Russian efforts to influence the election are now undeniable. Tens of millions of dollars where spent over several years to build a sophisticated and broad system that influenced American opinion. By publishing native content they tried to convince their audiences that they were authentic American voices (http://bit.do/rus-us). U.S. Special counsel Robert Mueller unveiled details of a widespread and coordinated campaign by Russians to promote and influence a Pro-Trump meddling (http://bit.do/rus-us2).

Denver Guardian, a fake news website, published a story on the 5th of November 2016 (3 days before the election) with the title: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide”. The story alleged that an FBI agent who was investigating Hillary Clinton had been found dead in a Maryland house fire. The story was published on Facebook where it was shared by more than half a million times and generating 15.5 million impressions (http://bit.do/hillary2).

But it’s only getting worse. With Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence on the rise, text, voice and image manipulation has become easier than ever. Companies and individuals are developing real-time face capture and reenactment programs will enable people to create false video confessions, catfishing, and many more criminal possibilities (example with former U.S. President Bush: http://bit.do/ai-fa).

Lip syncing from audio files has enabled artificial intelligence to recreate accurate lip movement into target video clips. Once again, this enables criminal possibilities such as false video confessions, catfishing and many more (example with former U.S. president Obama: http://bit.do/obama2).

Another big hit on the internet right now is the current trend of Deepfakes. Deepfakes are Artificial Intelligence generated fake porn videos where faces of porn stars are swapped with anyone ( http://bit.do/df13 ). Deepfakes usually swap celebrity faces onto porn performers but people are using them now to create fake porn of their friends and classmates (http://bit.do/df11). This is very concerning since people can use it as blackmail.

With the constant improvement of Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence in combination with Social Platforms where information can spread very fast, we will be unable in many cases to distinguish either false information or true information. What is concerning me is that people are not aware of the problem at all.

Don’t believe everything you read.

Originally published on LinkedIn.