The moribund thread concerning deepfakes, the difficult-to-detect manipulation of videos for malign purposes, gets an airing on Lawfare in the form of a response by Bobby Chesney of the University of Texas Law School to an opinion that maybe deepfakes aren’t all that important after all:
Making matters worse, growing awareness of the deep fake threat is itself potentially harmful. It increases the chances people will fall prey to a phenomenon that two of us (Chesney and Citron) call the Liar’s Dividend. Instead of being “fooled” by deep fakes, people may grow to distrust all video and audio recordings. Truth decay is a boon to the morally corrupt. Liars can escape accountability for wrongdoing and dismiss real evidence of their mischief by saying it is “just a deep fake.” Politicians have already tried to leverage the Liar’s Dividend. At the time of the release of the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, for example, then-candidate Trump struggled to defend his words of “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” A year later, however, President Trump tried to cast doubt on the recording by saying that it was fake or manipulated. The president later made a similar claim in trying to distance himself from his own comments on the firing of FBI Director Comey during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. Such attempts will find a more-receptive audience in the future, as awareness grows that it is possible to make fake videos and audios that cannot be detected as fakes solely by our eyes and ears.
Can technology really save us, as [Tim] Hwang suggested, by spawning reliable detection tools? As an initial matter, we disagree with the claim that detection tools inevitably will win the day in this cat-and-mouse game. We certainly are not there yet with respect to detection of deep fakes that are created with Generative Adversarial Networks, and it is not clear that we should be optimistic about reaching that point. Decades of experience with the arms races involving spam, malware, viruses and photo fakery have taught us that playing defense is difficult and that adversaries can be highly motivated and innovative, constantly finding ways to penetrate defenses. Even if capable detection technologies emerge, moreover, it is not assured that they will prove scaleable, diffusible and affordable to the extent needed to have a dramatic impact on the deep fake threat.
I think retreating from the belief that videos show the unvarnished truth to the position that no video is trustworthy would encourage a creeping belief that there is no truth, no facts, just positions, supported by manufactured evidence, taken by people seeking power. We’ve seen a lot of that from the right-wing extremists, from their disregard of scientific research concerning subjects as diverse as abortion and climate change, to the memes coursing through the conservative blood stream attacking the veracity of Snopes, the decades-old website dedicated to uncovering Internet-based hoaxes, lies, and affiliated deceptions. In fact, for the last few years Snopes has been forced into a quasi-bizarre legal quagmire by their own website hosting service (this is their GoFundMe page), which I do not pretend to understand, but appears to be a malicious attack by the forces who fear the truth. Similarly, although to a lesser extent, the American far left also seems to disregard truth in its attacks on the traditional power structure, although here my knowledge mainly derives from the occasional rebuff Andrew Sullivan delivers them in his weekly diary entries. They want to disregard the biological effects of being one sex or the other; Sullivan wishes to acknowledge and even celebrate them. To the left, I can only say that disregarding ugly facts may be alluring, but not the strategy of a successful engineer. Well, that goes for both sides, now doesn’t it?
Be that as it may, I have my doubts about the technological capability of detecting frauds, and therefore I have to wonder if a more social solution to this problem may be necessary, such as creating a registry of videos. No doubt that’ll provoke screams – really loud screams – and then we’d all have to learn to check the registry rather than just presume this or that video is really authentic. And then initial authentication, this is an untampered film of a real event, becomes an issue. It all makes my head spin.
But being forced to distrust everything that we didn’t personally experience is a recipe for breaking up a society. The anti-vaxxers are, in a sense, well on their way to doing that by spreading false information built on distrust of corporations whose main driving force is often just profits. In that sense, their position is understandable due to the behavior of many corporations, or, in other words, their execs, in always driving to increase profits rather than increase the social capital[1] of their corporations. They become the bad guys, even when they aren’t, because they have not articulately communicated to each other, their successors, and their customers the importance of delivering an honest product for an honest fee that hasn’t been built on the backs of the vulnerable, human and non-human.
And sometimes it just feels like it’s getting worse, and that’s because it is. Extremists who don’t like today’s realities call it hoaxes or social constructs and then try to blunder right through them. But when it comes to foundational realities, that doesn’t work so well.
So I hope we can find a way around the deepfake problem, whether it’s technological, verificational – or we just push every person who commits a deepfake off a sea-cliff for the orcas to eat. Otherwise society may disintegrate, or more likely mutate, into something that is less friendly and productive.
1 Social capital, a term I haven’t run across in a very long time, might be best understood as the measurement of how much the institution in question contributes to society. This is versus the usual financial measurements used to decide how well a company is doing – and the deserved “compensation” for the corporate executives. Perhaps society needs to shift away from financial to social capital measurements.
