Deepfakes Are Going To Wreak Havoc On Society. We Are Not Prepared

Author: Rob Toews URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/ One-line: Deepfakes are about to make synthetic media indistinguishable from reality, and the bigger danger is not any single fake but the collapse of any shared basis for believing what we see.

Highlights #Deepfakes

• Deepfake technology enables anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to create realistic-looking photos and videos of people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do.
• At the beginning of 2019 there were 7,964 deepfake videos online, according to a report from startup Deeptrace; just nine months later, that figure had jumped to 14,678.
• Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long.
• In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. Society needs to act now to prepare itself.
• As of September 2019, 96% of deepfake videos online were pornographic, according to the Deeptrace report.
• Imagine deepfake footage of a politician engaging in bribery or sexual assault right before an election; or of U.S. soldiers committing atrocities against civilians overseas; or of President Trump declaring the launch of nuclear weapons against North Korea. In a world where even some uncertainty exists as to whether such clips are authentic, the consequences could be catastrophic.
• Technologists agree. In the words of Hani Farid, one of the world’s leading experts on deepfakes: “If we can’t believe the videos, the audios, the image, the information that is gleaned from around the world, that is a serious national security risk.”
• Even more insidiously, the mere possibility that a video could be a deepfake can stir confusion and facilitate political deception regardless of whether deepfake technology has actually been used.
• But whether the video was real is almost beside the point. The larger lesson is that the emergence of deepfakes will make it increasingly difficult for the public to distinguish between what is real and what is fake, a situation that political actors will inevitably exploit—with potentially devastating consequences.
• “People are already using the fact that deepfakes exist to discredit genuine video evidence,” said USC professor Hao Li. “Even though there’s footage of you doing or saying something, you can say it was a deepfake and it’s very hard to prove otherwise.”
• Researcher Aviv Ovadya warns of what she terms “reality apathy”: “It’s too much effort to figure out what’s real and what’s not, so you’re more willing to just go with whatever your previous affiliations are.”
• In a world in which seeing is no longer believing, the ability for a large community to agree on what is true—much less to engage in constructive dialogue about it—suddenly seems precarious. #Relative Truth
• A handful of startups have emerged that offer software to defend against deepfakes, including Truepic and Deeptrace.
• “We are outgunned,” said Farid. “The number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to 1.”
• The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrines the freedom of expression. Any law proscribing online content, particularly political content, risks running afoul of these constitutional protections.
• Yet as legal scholars Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron put it, these tech platforms’ terms-of-service agreements are “the single most important documents governing digital speech in today’s world.”
• A related legislative option is to amend the controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Written in the early days of the commercial Internet, Section 230 gives Internet companies almost complete civil immunity for any content posted on their platforms by third parties. Walking these protections back would make companies like Facebook legally responsible for limiting the spread of damaging content on their sites. But such an approach raises complex free speech and censorship concerns.
• The recent rise of fake news has led to fears that we are entering a “post-truth” world. Deepfakes threaten to intensify and accelerate this trajectory. #Post-Truth
• “The man in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square moved the world,” said NYU professor Nasir Memon. “Nixon on the phone cost him his presidency. Images of horror from concentration camps finally moved us into action. If the notion of not believing what you see is under attack, that is a huge problem. One has to restore truth in seeing again.”

Connections

• Deepfakes — the core subject: synthetic media that makes anyone appear to say or do anything.
• Post-Truth — deepfakes as an accelerant of the “post-truth” trajectory begun by fake news.
• Relative Truth — the deeper threat is the erosion of a shared, agreed-upon reality, not any single fake.
• Section 230 — amending platform liability protections floated as one (fraught) legislative lever.