From The Cairo Review
The Future of Democracy in the Age of Deepfakes
By Hany Farid
By most surveys, some 1 in 5 Americans dismiss or deny the effects of global climate change. At the tail end of the global COVID pandemic, 1 in 5 Americans believed the statement “Bill Gates plans to use COVID-19 to implement a mandatory vaccine program with microchips to track people.” And, after Joe Biden won the presidential race in 2020, more than half of Republican voters believed that Donald Trump rightfully won.
Basic facts regarding our planet’s health, our public health, and the foundations of our democracy are being denied by a significant number of citizens. This prevalent alternate reality is not unique to the United States; this plague of lies, conspiracies, misinformation, and disinformation is global in nature.
Most of the beliefs in these (and other) baseless claims are being spread through traditional channels and social media, and amplified by famous personalities, influencers, politicians, and some billionaires. What happens when the landscape that has allowed widespread and dangerous conspiracies to take hold is super-charged by generative AI?
Making Deepfakes
Before the less-objectionable term “generative AI” took root, AI-generated content was referred to as “deepfakes”, a term derived from the moniker of a 2017 Reddit user who used this nascent technology to create non-consensual intimate imagery, NCII (often referred to by the misnomer “revenge porn”, suggesting somehow that the women depicted inflicted a harm deserving of revenge)...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
