It’s getting to be a really scary world out there.
Maybe it always was, but with eight billion people on the planet and the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence on the internet, it kind of feels like we’re reeling toward the border of Terminator territory. Skynet no longer seems as science-fictiony as it did when the movie came out in 1984.
Recently, I had my first (at least I think it was my first) encounter with deepfake technology. It was a generated video posing as a CBC news story with the anchor “revealing” a secret investment Justin Trudeau and Elon Musk are both in on and ‘you can be too!’ or something along those lines.
I’m sorry I can’t describe it in any more detail, but I was not able to find it again for research purposes. It popped up on my Facebook feed and was gone. Of course, Meta doesn’t want us going to back to “content” we’ve already seen. We must always be moving on to the next thing to benefit their bottom line.
And it’s entirely possible they removed it. Although they seem reluctant and/or unable to police these scams, they are against their policies and if enough people complain they will take action. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t seen it again, though, because even if policing this stuff was a priority for Meta, it’s pretty futile. It’s like a digital game of whack-a-mole. No sooner do you knock it down on one site, it pops up on another.
Fortunately, I quickly sussed this out as a scam because it just didn’t feel like the kind of story CBC would do and I’m naturally skeptical of, well, virtually everything. And financial scams are blatantly transparent. If you can’t figure out that something that sounds too good to be true is not true, you probably deserve to be scammed.
Wikipedia describes deepfake like this:
“While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage tools and techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence, including facial recognition algorithms and artificial neural networks such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs).”
I was a senior manager in the high-tech business until 2001 and have no clue what half this stuff is.
The article goes on:
“In turn, the field of image forensics develops techniques to detect manipulated images.”
This stuff has become advanced enough there’s a “field” devoted to counteracting it!
We are going to have to get hyper-vigilant about this stuff very quickly. With provincial and federal elections coming up in 2024 and 2025 respectively and numerous bad actors out there with various disruptive agendas, expect deepfake campaign videos of candidates to be everywhere.
And we’re extremely susceptible to political deception because we want to believe the candidate we already don’t like is an embezzler or something.
It’s getting to be a really scary world out there. I’m starting to think off-the-gridders may have the right idea.