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Let's have another one about AI, this time about deepfakes. A picture of a somalian politician speaking in front of an upside down American flag was circulating on Twitter. Fortunately, we had a helpful journalist investigate, and debunk the image as a deepfake. The politician's staff helpfully provided the real image.
Only one problem. The original image circulating on Twitter was real. And the image provided by the politician herself was the fake.
As of right now, the politician's own Twitter is still linking to the now-retracted article, which used the deepfake that she herself provided.
I think the most shocking thing here is that a "journalist" had both the real and fake images in front of her, didn't even take the smallest steps to verify the authenticity of either image. Did she just assume that a politician wouldn't just ... lie ... and simply felt like the authority was enough to come to a conclusion? I think this forum already knows, but journalistic integrity has fallen so far that this laughably bad deepfake is just passed off as true because someone said so. Once deepfakes get more convincing (I had the latest nano banana try generating a similar deepfake and it was basically flawless), we're going to have to stop trusting the papers and our lying eyes too.
The other thing is that this is some seriously insane level of chutzpah here. Who is going to see a real image circulating around, then call the real image a deepfake, then provide their own deepfake as the supposed "real" image as "proof"? It's so farfetched that I'm surprised anyone would think this harebrained plot would work. Yet somehow it did and was regurgitated in other outlets including our favourite Axios.
This also shows that a politician can just pants on fire lie now with zero consequences. Not like trump level off the cuff stupid lies, but lie about what literally just happened at an event that dozens of people attended, with a multitude of official and unofficial videos and photos posted on multiple social media platforms, including the politician's own Facebook page. To point to a completely authentic image and just lie and call it fake. The gaslighting is off the charts. She can post "This never happened here's "proof"", while the video evidence is RIGHT THERE, posted on literally the same Facebook page, and people will eat it up.
In the comments sections and Twitter (stupid places I know) they are somehow still arguing that the evil nazis are somehow still the bad guys in this situation.
Anyways I suspect that once activists figure out on a wide scale what they can get away with on deepfakes with zero consequences, and how bad people are at noticing them, things are going to get really messy really fast.
(I don't want this to be about a left/right thing, I want to talk about ai and fact checking and whatever please)
Well I think it is in the sense that it threatens to help polarize the United States even more than the present. If the leaders from each side are able to present credible evidence/argument to their supporters that (1) the other side is full of bad people who want to do them serious harm; and (2) any evidence contradicting the narrative is fake, it really has the potential to cause a lot of trouble.
Personally, as a conservative, if a photo came out showing Trump or some other Republican doing something very embarrassing I would be automatically skeptical of it and predisposed to believe evidence that the photo was faked, even if that evidence came from the politician at issue. That sort of bias is just heavily ingrained in human psychology.
That’s pretty much what happened here. The real image showed a Somali politician with the flag upside down, showing at best ignorance and at worst disrespect for the flag. Journalists who don’t want the immigrant community to be seen in either of those ways is strongly biased towards any way to “debunk” that idea.
And this is why deep fakes will work most of the time. They don’t have to even be good, they just have to conform to what people want to be true.
The most charitable interpretation was that the person simply wasn't paying attention. As a Trump supporter, if Trump appeared in front of an upside down flag, I would assume that he is old, distracted, and probably focused more on any attractive women in the area.
I think part of the issue here is that Somali-Americans are perceived by many as being completely hostile and disloyal to the United States, and appearing in front of an upside down flag confirms that perception on an emotional level.
I agree completely, and I would add that your typical journalist in the US probably has a very negative opinion about the sort of person who would spread these kind of images. Probably the journalist thinks such people are racist, stupid, etc. "Deplorable" is the right word. So yeah, it would be very easy to convince your typical journalist that the Deplorables are trading fake images to foment their own racism.
Combine that with (1) convenient mechanisms, e.g. Twitter, for distributing such things; and (2) the lack of a credible authority as to what is fake and what is real, then yeah I think your prediction is probably accurate.
In fact, I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events. For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco. It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.
These things are extremely hard to predict, but I would guess that AI generated materials will lead to significantly more polarization in the United States, even more than we have now.
Somewhat relevant would be the Gabriel Paul Horcasitas case, where an AI video of the victim (Pelkey) was used.
I initially thought the video was in favor of lenience for Horcasitas, since it mentions forgiveness and the article talks about the sentence being tossed, but when I checked as I was making this post I realized I got it backwards: the video was created by Pelkey's family, who were pushing for the maximum possible punishment. The judge mentioned being moved by the video, and gave the maximum sentence. This was sufficient for the sentencing to be tossed on appeal, as the appeals court was not happy with AI influence. So not a problem in this particular case, since presumably resentencing will be uninfluenced by AI.
I'm curious if that position persists across time and situations: if a sympathetic-to-the-assailant family had made a video of the victim forgiving him and saying he shouldn't get a significant sentence and that somehow made it through the courtroom, would the sentence get overturned?
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I've seen two examples tweeted within the last week. I can't find one, but here's the other, when it came up on Reddit several months ago. The post photo is reportedly AI, though based on the real (probably? hopefully?) video linked by some of the commenters.
Neither example was of a drugged-up orgy, thankfully.
The Reddit comment to this effect, "its not misinformation, it happened - the "photo" is ai, the story is not.", is only slightly net upvoted, but IIRC it was even worse on Twitter.
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