A New Kind of Fake News

Amanda Ehrmantraut

ae513115@ohio.edu

In this age of ever-present technology— combined with a political climate that is growingly tense— it begins to feel as though no source can be fully trusted.

The options for creating fake or misleading content are endless, and when people wish to push agendas that can be benefitted by support and corroboration, it may be tempting to falsify those facts.

It can be something as simple as creating a fake Tweet. There are websites that make generating these as simple as a few clicks, and anyone with internet access has the power to put words in someone like the president's mouth. 

This is an example of a fake tweet created to make people believe it was posted by President Trump. Source: www.her.ie

This is obviously dangerous. The wrong person could see one of these posts, whether it is intentionally malicious or meant to be a harmless joke, and feel threatened by the things Trump or another powerful official "says," retaliating against the nation because of it.

This same problem exists with "deepfakes," images that are created using artificial intelligence. They can be created in someone else's likeness, and this victim can appear in videos to say whatever the creator chooses.

Faces generated by AI have become more and more realistic as resources grow. They are detailed and expressive, and almost indistinguishable from images of real people. This poses even more risks than a Tweet— who doesn’t trust a video?

In 2007, Allan Detrich was discovered to have manipulated many of the images that he submitted for publishing as a photographer for the Toledo Blade. He did things like remove unsightly bushes or add dramatically-placed basketballs in sports shots. His alterations were not necessarily harmful, and they probably would not start World War III, but they were misleading and did not maintain the ethics of truthful journalism.

Detrich’s edits were wrong, but where is the line drawn? Photographers often adjust brightness or color settings to make their photos more visually appealing. Is that okay? What about photo illustrations that are intentionally changed and Photoshopped?

We have mostly learned as a society not to trust the things we see online. However, this generally applies much further to text and written stories rather than visual elements.

Even, some might say, to a fault, we have grown skeptical of nearly every news story we read, regardless of its source. Media trust has reached an all-time low.

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With all of the technology that now exists, we need to apply this same level of cynicism to photos and videos, which we previously never expected to be so easily manipulated. They are seen as proof— undeniable visual proof. Sadly, this does not work anymore.