The concerns about deepfakes continue, as reported in WaPo:
Airbrushing and Photoshop long ago opened photos to easy manipulation. Now, videos are becoming just as vulnerable to fakes that look deceptively real. Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike “deepfake” videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie.
But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse. The fakes are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect. And although their legality hasn’t been tested in court, experts say they may be protected by the First Amendment — even though they might also qualify as defamation, identity theft or fraud.
Being a movie star just makes you a bigger target, as one of the biggest stars, Scarlett Johansson, reports:
“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”
And, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible approaches to this problem. I’m not saying that there won’t be any, but that, so far, none have come forward to thrust away the encroaching darkness.
So I’ve been musing on a contrarian approach, based on the old parents’ approach to the kid smoking cigarettes:
Here, kid, have thirty more, and finish them in an hour.
And then watch the kid puke all over the place and never smoke again.
That is, I’ve been considering the idea that our country’s elites should commission deepfakes using their own visages. Consider, perhaps, the head of Senator Mitch McConnell doing it with the head of Senator Harris, or perhaps (better yet) with soon-to-be-ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, said heads mounted on suitably young and lascivious bodies. Multiply that by thousands. Involve movie stars, sports stars, broadcasters, governors, zookeepers, your neighbors.
And then flood 8chan and all the other sites currently used by the creators of deepfakes with these videos. Absolutely bomb them. An overwhelming torrent of fake porn involving people who are being abused, or potentially could be abused, but now under their own control. Set up a site named MyDeepFakes.org just to display them.
One of the salient factors motivating the outrage and mortification caused by deepfakes is the old, and now out of date assumption, that video doesn’t lie. People can lie, forget, misremember, and confabulate, but the film, the cold and objective eye of technology, does not lie. That is one of the underlying bulwarks of humanity’s romance with technology.
And now that bulwark is being corrupted. It’s becoming a myth.
So, if we can’t stop the corruption, let’s wipe out that myth. If deepfakes of an obviously ludicrous nature become easily available to everyone, we can begin the process of removing concerns that someone may actually believe a fallacious deepfake. This could be a game changer. Consider this remark by media critic and deepfake victim Anita Sarkeesian, from the same WaPo article:
Sarkeesian said the deepfakes were more proof of “how terrible and awful it is to be a woman on the Internet, where there are all these men who feel entitled to women’s bodies.”
“For folks who don’t have a high profile, or don’t have any profile at all, this can hurt your job prospects, your interpersonal relationships, your reputation, your mental health,” Sarkeesian said. “It’s used as a weapon to silence women, degrade women, show power over women, reducing us to sex objects. This isn’t just a fun-and-games thing. This can destroy lives.”
But she is right for only so long as videos are taken as serious evidence of reality. Destroy that myth, and most of the damage can no longer be inflicted by these despicable moral children, because that damage depends on the credibility of the medium, and this proposal tries to destroy that medium.
I actually do hesitate to put this thought forth. After all, objectivity is an important facet of the scientific method, and invalidating technology that has provided objectivity is somewhat dismaying. But if no other solution can be found, this counter-attack may be the only way to keep our society sane. I can see block clubs where everyone agrees to contribute photographs of their heads, from a number of angles, and a fee, and a few weeks later there are a thousand videos of everyone on the block having sex with everyone else on the block.
Or, gratifyingly, imagine receiving a blackmail email from some dud threatening to send a video of you having sex with someone other than your spouse, to your spouse, and your reply is “Hey, see this link where I’m doing it with President Trump, it’s up on FB where my spouse has already seen it, isn’t it cool you dud?”
It’s enough to make a Bishop’s head spin.
