We're in Deep: The Rise of the Deepfake Problem

Fake news has been a rising problem that seems to have gotten more prevalent in recent years. Though, as the fake news problem has been identified, we've been able to teach people how to spot it. If you know how to verify reliable sources, it should be relatively simple to spot fake news. But, what happens when the problem becomes much deeper than that, and you can no longer trust what you are looking at and hearing, your eyes are deceiving you? 

Deepfakes are defined as, "a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information." Deepfakes got their name from a reddit user of the same name who launched this "movement" by posting AI videos of celebrities faces onto bodies of porn stars. 

ARS Electronica photo of Jordan Peele's deepfake video of Barack Obama.

All it takes is one person with a vendetta and ulterior motive to create a deepfake that could quite literally ruin someone's life. Or on the reverse of that, someone receiving backlash for a comments they have made on video, can lie and attempt to retract what they said under the guise of deepfakes.

A more recent video could have lead to more catastrophic results. Earlier this year, a deepfake video was circulating the internet showing Ukrainian President Zelensky telling his soldiers to lay their arms and surrender. Thankfully the video was quickly proved to be fake and removed before it could do irreparable damage. 

Screenshot of Mikael Thalen's tweet showing the deepfake video of President Zelensky.

These videos violate policies across social media platforms, and the Zelensky video was able to be debunked, but we may not be very far off from deepfake videos that are indistinguishable from real ones. We are likely not far off from a video like this causing large scale political unrest. Realistically, even if most people can tell a video is a deepfake and it seems obvious, there still may be many out there who are unable to identify such videos and go on believing it. 

With the rise of deepfakes, and the tools needed to create them being more accessible to the public in forms of apps, how can we expect anyone to trust any media they consume? There is of course the importance of viewing everything with a critical eye, but feeling like you need to distrust everything before you do adequate research into it to be able to trust it, is exhausting and rather backwards.