I’ve already seen some really good deep fakes of famous people that both look and sound real. That was over a year ago and the technology is far better now. I just watched this NBC Nightly News clip on TikTok:

The whole video is cautionary and a little scary, looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a possible threat to Humanity. At the 2:17 minute mark this was said,

“AI tools can already mimic voices, ace exams, create art, and diagnose diseases. And they are getting smarter every day.

In two years by the time of the election, human beings will not be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.”

It occurred to me that the lead up to the next US election is going to include countless deep fakes that will be virally shared and reposted and re-shared, which will be far more convincing than anything we’ve seen so far. The clever ones won’t be far fetched in content, they will be convincing because they will subtly send people down a specific narrative without being outrageous or egregious and easy to spot. For example: Biden supporting and endorsing some ultra-left wing, ‘woke’ group the makes the right outraged. Or Trump speaking to a friend about how he hates guns and the NRA. Each of these can be completely fabricated and completely convincing.

This is really scary because where you get your news will be vitally important. Hopefully major news outlets would vet the videos and verify authenticity before sharing, but digital newspapers are always worried about missing the scoop and letting other networks go viral. Many less reputable sites will share the fake videos just because it fits their narrative. Other sites will knowingly share the fake videos because their intent is to mislead, and to feed anger and vitriol to their naive followers.

Conspiracies will be magnified and any mention of the videos being fake will be counter argued that reports of the video being faked are just the way the government is trying to keep the truth from you. The message being, the fakes are real and the reports of them being fake is the fake news. People already believe fake articles with no fact-checking, they are going to be completely fooled by extremely convincing fake videos.

My advice, find websites that you trust and make sure the web url is correct. Follow people you trust and question anything suspicious from them that isn’t from your trusted sites. If it’s not from your trusted site, if it’s not right from the horses mouth and it seems suspicious, consider it fake until you verify.

How serious is this? You don’t have to be famous to be deep faked. Here is a story of a mom thinking she was talking to her kidnapped daughter, convinced it was her voice on the phone with her kidnappers, but it was a fake and her daughter was upstairs in her room. The point of the video is to have a safe word with your family because anyone’s voice can be easily faked.

We are entering a time when people are defining truth differently, when fakes seem more like truth, and when sources of information are going to be as important as the information itself.