This is an excerpt from an article originally published at USA Today
In October, a viral video showed model Bella Hadid, who is half-Palestinian, apologizing for past remarks and expressing support for Israel. At the time, the internet was being swarmed with videos of destroyed buildings and children crying in the rubble of Gaza. Journalists concluded that these internet videos as well as numerous others were fabrications known as deepfakes.
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a deepfake is “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”
Deepfakes are so ubiquitous and convincing, that the public needs to be equipped with critical media literacy skills to avoid being persuaded by these falsehoods. It is true that there is a long history of manipulating images: Photographers staged pictures during the Civil War, news media such as Fox News have altered images to lampoon opponents, and political operatives have introduced and altered images in a way to engender racist sentiment among voters.
However, the advent of artificial intelligence coupled with smart devices and platforms such as Instagram have enabled users to manipulate images with ease.
Many in the tech industry saw the threats posed by deepfakes years in advance. In 2016, technologist Aviv Ovadya raised the alarm about an "Infocalypse."
“We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we're even more screwed now," Ovadya told BuzzFeed News in 2018. "And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”
Less than a decade later, as advancements have been made in AI, Ovadya’s warning has come to fruition.
It is now possible to generate political advertisements with the click of a button, create lifelike renditions of deceased people as talking heads in documentaries, produce songs from deceased artists and construct videos of prominent figures such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being drunk during a speech or former President Barack Obama speaking comedically on fake news. These deepfakes get more convincing by the day.
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Excellent piece! I've shared it widely.