Don’t believe everything you see on the internet. This is one of the fundamental rules of using the worldwide web, and it dates back to the earliest days of dial-up. In the ’90s, chain emails spread hoaxes like wildfire, but those of us who weren’t entirely gullible knew to question anything we received with “FW: FW: FW:” in the subject line. The rise of chat rooms and social media made it even easier to spread misinformation to thousands of strangers. Around the same time, photo editing software was becoming vastly more powerful and accessible, so we began to see the spread of Photoshopped hoax images across the internet. Much like chain letters had morphed into chain emails, this type of hoax was nothing new, but the advancement of tech made it far easier to create and disseminate. Photo manipulation techniques that used to require hours of labor in a photographer’s darkroom could now be accomplished in seconds.
Today, misinformation has reached another new frontier: artificial intelligence. Publicly accessible AI tools are being used to automate the creation of so-called deepfakes, a term based on the “deep learning” neural network technology that’s harnessed to create them. Now, instead of manually blending images together in Photoshop, we can let AI do the hard work for us. And it’s not only useful for still images — deepfake technology can also process each frame of a video to swap a subject’s face (for example: youtu.be/CDMVaQOvtxU). AI can also be used to closely mimic a human voice based on audio samples and read back any text the user inputs (youtu.be/ddqosIpR2Mk).
Deepfakes aren’t just a hypothetical threat — they’re already being used to manipulate, confuse, or outright deceive viewers. In 2020, the parents of Joaquin Oliver, a 17-year-old who died during the Parkland school shooting, used deepfake technology to recreate their dead son’s likeness and create a video where he urged young Americans to vote for more aggressive gun control. More recently, deepfakes of both Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian President Putin appeared in an attempt to encourage the opposing side’s troops to surrender or retreat; the latter clip was aired on Russian TV in what the Kremlin decried as a “hack.” Cybercriminals are also using deepfake technology to persuade unsuspecting businesses and individuals to transfer money or give up sensitive info. And in the most twisted cases, AI is being used to generate deepfake pornography of people — even children — who are totally unaware of the disturbing and humiliating way their likenesses are being altered. A 2022 report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated, “Non-consensual pornography emerged as the catalyst for proliferating deepfake content, and still represents a majority of AI-enabled synthetic content in the wild … The ramifications of deepfake pornography have only begun to be seen.”
