From Newsweek.com (March 24):
In March 20 British journalist Eliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat investigative website, posted an extraordinary series of images. They showed Donald Trump, former president and Republican frontrunner for 2024, being tackled to the ground by police officers. Somehow Trump slips from their grasp and runs down the street, with law enforcement in pursuit. He is once again caught, as Melania appears to scream at officers, and is next pictured inside a prison cell.
The series continues with Trump in court, then prison, from which the former president makes a Shawshank Redemption-style escape and ends up in a McDonald's.
If you're wondering whether you somehow missed the news event of the decade you can be assured none of this actually happened, something Higgins was entirely clear about. Instead, the pictures were created using Midjourney, one of a growing number of artificial intelligence-based image creators, as an intellectual experiment. They were deepfakes, synthetic media created with the aid of artificial intelligence.
Deepfakes have been around for a number of years but what is changing, and at breakneck speed, is both their sophistication and the number of people who can create them.
This, combined with an increasingly conspiracy-laden American political culture, is sparking growing concerns about the next presidential election, with one expert telling Newsweek they expect deepfakes to be "deployed quite broadly" in 2024.
……….
The Threat to 2024
In an interview with Newsweek, Henry Ajder, a deepfakes expert who presents a podcast on the subject for the BBC, said he's particularly concerned about the 2024 presidential election following "the explosion we've seen generative content" over the past year.
He said: "So for me 2024 is looking increasingly likely to be an election where deepfakes are deployed quite broadly.
"The real key question is whether there is an incredibly high-quality deepfake, which is very hard to authenticate or falsify, and is linked to a critical period in the electoral process. Say the eve of an election, or before one of the debates, and becomes part of the narrative from the opposition."
Ajder argued the threat is intensified by public ignorance over AI developments, stating: "A lot of people aren't familiar or used to the fact you can now clone voices quite convincingly, or that you can generate entirely new images of say Trump getting arrested as we've seen over the last couple of days on Twitter.
"So when people aren't inoculated, or aware, of the changing AI and information landscape, you start to see people lagging behind the understanding and becoming more susceptible."
Concern about 2024 was also expressed by Matthew F. Ferraro, a counsel at WilmerHale who specializes in emerging technology like deepfakes. Speaking to Newsweek, he said: "I expect that we will see many more deepfake videos of political figures and candidates circulate online between now and the 2024 presidential election. Many of these videos will be satirical or clear parodies.
"The more worrisome kind of deepfakes will be those that purport to show political figures in real events in an attempt to mislead voters about what is true and what is false. These deepfakes could confuse voters and help to undermine fair elections."
Ferraro added America's strong conspiracy theory scene could make the country particularly vulnerable, stating: "Deepfakes take society's existing problems of disinformation and conspiracism and pour jet fuel on them." [read more]
Scary.
Another article on deepfakes:
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