With “deepfakes” and generative artificial intelligence improving exponentially, the internet may soon become filled with more thoroughly convincing lies than ever before.
What new dangers will arise? Who will protect us?
“As AI-generated deepfakes are being used to spread false information in elections around the world,” NPR reported in February, “policymakers, tech companies and governments are trying to catch up.”
We are told to fear foreign agents, malicious hackers, and anonymous miscreants online. We are also told that governments want to protect us, and that they need cooperation from the tech industry and vigilance by the news media.
“AI will turbocharge efforts to discourage voters or spread bogus claims,” NPR fretted, “especially in the immediate run-up to an election, when there’s little time for journalists or campaigns to fact-check or debunk.”
But maybe, just maybe, the folks to fear when it comes to high-tech deception and, to borrow the phrase of the industry, misinformation, are the folks who have total control over what we see on the internet: the major media, the government, and Big Tech.
In the pre-AI times, it’s been government, the media, and major technology companies that have tried to control what we know and what we can see by rewriting or erasing the past.
Remember when Barack Obama’s State Department deleted an awkward question and answer from the official archive video of a press briefing? Remember when Katie Couric’s producers doctored an interview with gun-rights advocates to make them look dumb, and made it the centerpiece of their anti-gun documentary?
The lying-by-video was being done by the very folks who are supposed to protect us from lying by video.
The most recent instance is low-stakes but telling. Singer Alicia Keys missed a few notes at the opening of her performance during the Super Bowl’s halftime show. But if you watch the video of the song the NFL is publishing, you wouldn’t know it — the song has been edited to perfection.
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NBC has been removing episodes of its sitcoms that were written before the Great Awokening of the last decade, because what was funny in 2012 is white supremacy today. Facebook and Twitter have both shown their willingness to throttle access to politically inconvenient news around election time.
A world that relies upon electronic record keeping that stores those records on the internet is a world where the powerful can rewrite history. So we hope NPR will forgive us if we don’t expect tech giants and governments to be the bulwarks against revisionist AI disinformation.