I Have Absolute Proof!

Conspiracy theorists point lovingly to viral social media and “factual” websites to support their rather obviously distorted view of what is happening in the world. It is this propensity to believe “what is written,” what is retransmitted as the gospel often received from fellow conspiracy theorists, that continues to empower the Russian apparat of digital disinformation used to destabilize democratic elections the world over and to discredit Western leaders who criticize mother Russia. The hyper-accelerant of polarization and discontent, fueling the undercutting of democratic institutions unprepared to defend against such onslaughts under the protection of free speech. The very liberalism of communication that lies at the heart of democracy is precisely its Achilles Heel.

With little or nothing being done by the Trump administration to stem this Russian tidal wave of destabilization – apparently to avoid admitting that the Russian effort was directed at supporting Trump and denigrating Clinton – the Russians are only accelerating their highly effective hacking the disinformation machine. The President is content to ignore the research and investigative results from his own intelligence agencies… and even his most recent political appointees… on point.

“Senior Trump administration officials warned Congress on Tuesday [5/22] of ongoing efforts by Russia to interfere in the 2018 midterm congressional elections as the federal government prepares to hand out $380 million in election security funding to states.

“At a briefing attended by about 40 or 50 members of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives, the heads of FBI, Homeland Security Department and the director of National Intelligence told members to urge states and cities overseeing elections to be prepared for threats….DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen [a most recent Trump appointee] told reporters she agreed Russia was trying to influence the 2018 elections.” Reuters, May 22^nd.

But if you think you’ve witnessed highly effective digital misdirection to date, think again. As artificial intelligence and technology improve, you ain’t seen nuffin’ yet. Audio-visual manipulation can now create seamless videos accompanied with voices that seem to be completely real… but they are creative visions that never happened, total fabrications.

Franklin Foer, writing for the May 18^th issue of The Atlantic, provides a coarse example of this new technological phenomenon: “In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax.

“This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack ‘deepfakes.’ And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude.

“The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come.”

If this is the “low grade” version of our digital future, and technology is accelerating, what exactly can you expect when over-funded, exceptionally technically-advanced software experts – such as the ones produced in Russia by the tens of thousands every year – decide to perfect this substitute-for-reality audio-visual manufacturing? Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and the expected horrors are obvious: you can pretty much get any person who has ever been recorded on video very convincingly to be depicted as saying and doing just about anything the audio-visual technologist wants them to say or do. Conspiracy theorists delight! Anything you can dream of will, sooner rather than later, be able to be constructed in a believable manner to support even the wildest and obviously false conspiracy theories imaginable.

But there is a side-effect to all this visual falsehood: the ability to challenge the veracity of audio-visual material that is not fake! Foer continues: “That all takes us to the nub of the problem. It’s natural to trust one’s own senses, to believe what one sees—a hardwired tendency that the coming age of manipulated video will exploit. Consider recent flash points in what the University of Michigan’s Aviv Ovadya calls the ‘infopocalypse’—and imagine just how much worse they would have been with manipulated video. Take Pizzagate [according to Salon.com, 12/10/16 – “‘Pizzagate’ [was a fake] conspiracy theory that's escalated to the point that an armed man actually drove up the East Coast to ‘self-investigate’ whether a D.C. pizza restaurant had a secret pedophilia dungeon in its basement, ending with him shooting his assault rifle inside the restaurant and being arrested”], and then add concocted footage of John Podesta leering at a child, or worse. Falsehoods will suddenly acquire a whole new, explosive emotional intensity.

“But the problem isn’t just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction. The president, reportedly, has already pioneered this tactic: Even though he initially conceded the authenticity of the Access Hollywood video, he now privately casts doubt on whether the voice on the tape is his own.

“In other words, manipulated video will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of common reality. As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, ‘It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.’” The real challenge will be how a First-Amendment-Protected-American-Democracy can effectively negate the democracy-destroying impact of speech and press reports that are depicted as real but are total fabrications. It gets worse when such offenses are so numerous as to defy tracking, verification and control.

I’m Peter Dekom, and given that we have a President who is rather completely reliant on his own dissemination of false information, it is difficult to see how our government can take meaningful steps to stop such conduct by others.