Operatives working for the Chinese and Iranian governments prepared fake, AI-generated content as part of a campaign to influence US voters in the closing weeks of the 2020 election campaign, current and former US officials briefed on the intelligence told CNN.
I fear the only real solution to deepfakes is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and always be excellent to each other, because I know that’s never going to happen. There are simply too many individuals and other entities happy to take advantage when given the benefit of the doubt. So what do we do? Isolate and mistrust each other? Cut off all but a handful of trusted confidantes? That’s exactly the goal of the people trying to fuck with our elections. Do we descend into fascism? Also the goal.
I just feel so defeated (which, yes, is yet another goal of the adversary). How do we win this?
I don’t feel like the deepfakes are the fundamental problem. Honestly, I think they’re a tiny symptom of a much more significant concern, and if we take care of that, foreign deepfakes will be irrelevant.
See, elections are an exercise in story telling. Multiple actors tell stories to multiple audiences and ask them to vote on which story resonates with them more. The biggest actors are the campaigns themselves, followed by allies like their parties, other politicians, thought leaders, the media, lobby groups, activists groups, and so on. And foreign actors are a part of that.
The problems presented in the article are really three things:
Foreigners are participating in presidential campaigns. No shit, of course they are. They have a stake in the outcome. Everyone with a stake participates, and that includes a ton of people we don’t like, like fossil fuel companies a billionaires.
They’re using deepfakes. This isn’t clearly a major change from all the bullshit we already deal with. Remember why Bush convinced everyone Al Gore was a pathological liar who claimed that he personally invented the internet? Or that John McCain had a secret illegitimate black child? Utter bullshit. It sucks, but it’s not new.
Finally, the most important part: campaigns have the ability and responsibility to simply tell a better story. If Biden loses, it’s going to be because people thought he was a senile, ineffective, caretaker president with no agenda or vision whatsoever. Is that true? Not really. But if people think that, it’s NOT because China is going to share a fake video of Biden acting senile. It’s going to be because Biden didn’t present himself in such a way to make a random unsourced video believable.
If any single messaging campaign can sway an election, it definitionally means that the campaign was less effective with all its money and staff and allies than a random nobody on twitter spreading nonsense. Which American nobodies already do anyway, regardless of whether the Ayatollah gets involved.
The problem is that our elections are vapid exercises in media manipulation rather than genuine exercises of participatory democracy, and the existing manipulators hate competition. The result isn’t to limit competition, it’s to focus on creating a free and fair democracy with a healthy media ecosystem.
I know I spoke about elections specifically, but I think most of my anxiety comes from how much bigger than just politics this problem is. My concern about what we’re facing is that we, each of us, can no longer trust evidence we haven’t borne firsthand witness to. It’s more fundamental than “spin”, or anything that’s come before. The greatest periods of advancement in human history happened on the back of the printing press, the telephone, the internet. Each of those new technologies heralded an expansion of an individual’s reach until any given person could reach across the globe effectively instantaneously, allowing theretofore unprecedented levels of human collaboration. Now we have a new technology which threatens the shrinking of our individual worlds, our social circles, down to just what and who we can reach out and touch. We won’t be able to trust anyone or anything else. It sounds like living all the worst parts of a Neal Stephenson novel.
I think that in the long term that there is one thing going for the truth: It is more coherent and more predictive of what is to come next.
If a country does a campaign that tries to fabricate a story from scratch if they aren’t very careful there will be some form of incoherence eventually if there is any slip up. That’s why its always easier to just frame the truth in positive or negative lights instead because it removes the need to try and create coherent stories.
And yes I know that there are people that believe incoherent truths about the world but that is mainly because it doesn’t actually affect most of the actions that they take on a day to day basis so they don’t have an actual incentive to improve their understanding of the world. If they need to make decisions based on that information they will make bad decisions until their understanding of the world has changed or they are out competed by people with more accurate beliefs.
T.L.D.R.
Lies take consistent effort to keep straight and eventually they’ll fuck up, Spin is easier and more effective for changing values, and people tend to have more accurate beliefs if they are actually useful to have them.
It will take a profound cultural shift, to the point where most people use their critical thinking skills to check the veracity of outrageous deep fake media clips. Is that likely to happen? Not really. But even if we can just increase critical thinking abilities by 10% that would be progress.
As a side note, it seems like most politicians who are caught saying outrageous things will do one of two things: deny them vociferously, or proudly brag and confirm that yes, they said/did that. So maybe it won’t be as hard to find the truth as we first think? Though that’s probably just me being overly optimistic.
Yeah the system of “this post probably has disinformation” did the opposite, and enticed idiots to re-spread those posts, thinking that their elusive “deep state” was working against them. It was working against them, but it was foreign entities and national corporations that want them to keep following their path of idiocy, and they happily bit the worm and swam with the hook
Critical thinking skills don’t help when the data is contaminated, though. Garbage in, garbage out. And the problem isn’t going to be when someone claims something - it’s going to be when they deny. Proof in any direction can be created at will, right?
Fight fire with fire? Make an AI that’s trained to recognize AI images? One for text? And probably soon one for video?
The box can’t be shut once its opened. We either find a way or lose what is reality and what is fiction. At that point you might as well not engage with the internet.
Unfortunately there’s not a reliable way to detect AI-generated content automatically, not without something like Google’s SynthID built into the model doing the generating. You’re bang-on that the box is open and can’t be shut, though, and I am spending more and more time thinking (anxiously) about what our collective adaptation to that fact is going to turn out to look like.
Its going to exacerbate what is already happening. People will subscribe to their own truths and have a slew of content that’s incomprehensible from fact and fiction. There will be fake politicians and candidates. Its going to be a nightmare and we are not on top of it. Plus, they’re already training the automatons to aim guns. Someone out there can script a trigger pull in a single line. We’re fucked doing what we are doing now.
Whichever technology you use to recognize AI-generated content will get repurposed quickly to help generate AI content that can’t be recognized. So it’s an arms race, and at some point the generation may get good enough that there is no effective way to recognize it.
I fear the only real solution to deepfakes is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and always be excellent to each other, because I know that’s never going to happen. There are simply too many individuals and other entities happy to take advantage when given the benefit of the doubt. So what do we do? Isolate and mistrust each other? Cut off all but a handful of trusted confidantes? That’s exactly the goal of the people trying to fuck with our elections. Do we descend into fascism? Also the goal.
I just feel so defeated (which, yes, is yet another goal of the adversary). How do we win this?
I don’t feel like the deepfakes are the fundamental problem. Honestly, I think they’re a tiny symptom of a much more significant concern, and if we take care of that, foreign deepfakes will be irrelevant.
See, elections are an exercise in story telling. Multiple actors tell stories to multiple audiences and ask them to vote on which story resonates with them more. The biggest actors are the campaigns themselves, followed by allies like their parties, other politicians, thought leaders, the media, lobby groups, activists groups, and so on. And foreign actors are a part of that.
The problems presented in the article are really three things:
Foreigners are participating in presidential campaigns. No shit, of course they are. They have a stake in the outcome. Everyone with a stake participates, and that includes a ton of people we don’t like, like fossil fuel companies a billionaires.
They’re using deepfakes. This isn’t clearly a major change from all the bullshit we already deal with. Remember why Bush convinced everyone Al Gore was a pathological liar who claimed that he personally invented the internet? Or that John McCain had a secret illegitimate black child? Utter bullshit. It sucks, but it’s not new.
Finally, the most important part: campaigns have the ability and responsibility to simply tell a better story. If Biden loses, it’s going to be because people thought he was a senile, ineffective, caretaker president with no agenda or vision whatsoever. Is that true? Not really. But if people think that, it’s NOT because China is going to share a fake video of Biden acting senile. It’s going to be because Biden didn’t present himself in such a way to make a random unsourced video believable.
If any single messaging campaign can sway an election, it definitionally means that the campaign was less effective with all its money and staff and allies than a random nobody on twitter spreading nonsense. Which American nobodies already do anyway, regardless of whether the Ayatollah gets involved.
The problem is that our elections are vapid exercises in media manipulation rather than genuine exercises of participatory democracy, and the existing manipulators hate competition. The result isn’t to limit competition, it’s to focus on creating a free and fair democracy with a healthy media ecosystem.
I know I spoke about elections specifically, but I think most of my anxiety comes from how much bigger than just politics this problem is. My concern about what we’re facing is that we, each of us, can no longer trust evidence we haven’t borne firsthand witness to. It’s more fundamental than “spin”, or anything that’s come before. The greatest periods of advancement in human history happened on the back of the printing press, the telephone, the internet. Each of those new technologies heralded an expansion of an individual’s reach until any given person could reach across the globe effectively instantaneously, allowing theretofore unprecedented levels of human collaboration. Now we have a new technology which threatens the shrinking of our individual worlds, our social circles, down to just what and who we can reach out and touch. We won’t be able to trust anyone or anything else. It sounds like living all the worst parts of a Neal Stephenson novel.
I think that in the long term that there is one thing going for the truth: It is more coherent and more predictive of what is to come next.
If a country does a campaign that tries to fabricate a story from scratch if they aren’t very careful there will be some form of incoherence eventually if there is any slip up. That’s why its always easier to just frame the truth in positive or negative lights instead because it removes the need to try and create coherent stories.
And yes I know that there are people that believe incoherent truths about the world but that is mainly because it doesn’t actually affect most of the actions that they take on a day to day basis so they don’t have an actual incentive to improve their understanding of the world. If they need to make decisions based on that information they will make bad decisions until their understanding of the world has changed or they are out competed by people with more accurate beliefs.
T.L.D.R.
Lies take consistent effort to keep straight and eventually they’ll fuck up, Spin is easier and more effective for changing values, and people tend to have more accurate beliefs if they are actually useful to have them.
Edit: grammar
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
It will take a profound cultural shift, to the point where most people use their critical thinking skills to check the veracity of outrageous deep fake media clips. Is that likely to happen? Not really. But even if we can just increase critical thinking abilities by 10% that would be progress.
As a side note, it seems like most politicians who are caught saying outrageous things will do one of two things: deny them vociferously, or proudly brag and confirm that yes, they said/did that. So maybe it won’t be as hard to find the truth as we first think? Though that’s probably just me being overly optimistic.
Yeah the system of “this post probably has disinformation” did the opposite, and enticed idiots to re-spread those posts, thinking that their elusive “deep state” was working against them. It was working against them, but it was foreign entities and national corporations that want them to keep following their path of idiocy, and they happily bit the worm and swam with the hook
Critical thinking skills don’t help when the data is contaminated, though. Garbage in, garbage out. And the problem isn’t going to be when someone claims something - it’s going to be when they deny. Proof in any direction can be created at will, right?
How do China and Iran benefit from the election of one candidate/party over the other?
Fight fire with fire? Make an AI that’s trained to recognize AI images? One for text? And probably soon one for video?
The box can’t be shut once its opened. We either find a way or lose what is reality and what is fiction. At that point you might as well not engage with the internet.
Unfortunately there’s not a reliable way to detect AI-generated content automatically, not without something like Google’s SynthID built into the model doing the generating. You’re bang-on that the box is open and can’t be shut, though, and I am spending more and more time thinking (anxiously) about what our collective adaptation to that fact is going to turn out to look like.
Its going to exacerbate what is already happening. People will subscribe to their own truths and have a slew of content that’s incomprehensible from fact and fiction. There will be fake politicians and candidates. Its going to be a nightmare and we are not on top of it. Plus, they’re already training the automatons to aim guns. Someone out there can script a trigger pull in a single line. We’re fucked doing what we are doing now.
Whichever technology you use to recognize AI-generated content will get repurposed quickly to help generate AI content that can’t be recognized. So it’s an arms race, and at some point the generation may get good enough that there is no effective way to recognize it.
Honestly from the outside it still looks 50/50 for this year. I’d bet that 2028 is likely to be much worse.
If I were you I’d get all the guns and tinned food you need now just in case you need them four years sooner than you think.