The ‘Deep Fake’ Threat
High-tech forged videos could wreak havoc on politics. Policy makers must be ready.
By The Editors
Pondering a strange new technology, in 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions perfect.” That’s becoming a bigger problem than he might’ve guessed.
Illusions have long thrived on the internet, of course, from doctored photos to fake news. But a newly sophisticated variety is worth paying attention to. Sometimes called “deep fakes,” they’re videos made with the help of artificial intelligence that appear genuine but depict events or speech that never happened. Without precautions, they could prove highly disruptive — to people and politics alike.
In their simplest form, these forgeries are fairly easy to produce. An aspiring video-faker can simply feed images of a given person to a machine-learning algorithm, which in turn learns to overlay their features onto the body from someone in another video, thereby creating a simulacrum of the original person doing things she hasn’t done. More advanced iterations are even more potent: Here, for example, is former president Barack Obama delivering an entirely fabricated speech.
