In George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), he portrayed a time when families would spend evenings in a room with a big screen on the wall. While they watched the screen, the screen watched them, spying and keeping records that were used to blackmail and imprison them. Orwell got a lot wrong. The screens he predicted were large. The ones of today come in all sizes, including the highly popular screen that fits in your pocket and can steal your personal data as you go about your day. Orwell also had the timing wrong. It didn’t happen in 1984. It happened in 2024.
Some are bound to argue with my choice of year. Computers and cell phones have been around longer than that. So why have I done such a daft thing as pick the present year? My excuse is that I believe 2024 will go down in history as the “Year of the Deepfake Elections.”
The term “deepfake” appeared on Reddit in 2017. But a fellow at the University of Montreal had already pioneered the technology in 2014. The idea of the deepfake is to digitally replace one person’s likeness with another. The “digital” here is important, because people started faking non-digital photographs practically the minute they were invented. But doing it on digital video and audio is a relatively new frontier.
And how quickly it has evolved. Right off the bat, deepfakes were used for blackmail and character assassination, starting with putting celebrity heads on other bodies in pornographic videos. This was the adolescent phase. Actually, “phase” is a wrong concept for something that has practically happened all at once. One of the founding fathers of the deepfake was a fellow who mingled digital video of himself with that of Barack Obama and fooled most of the people most of the time in 2017. Another deepfake milestone was when Donald Trump was seen on video encouraging the population of Belgium to exit the Paris climate agreement. In that case there was more reason to be fooled, but for once the stupid thing wasn’t being said by the real Donald.
Under the ubiquitous name AI (artificial intelligence), deepfaking is now so commonplace that your kids might get a deepfake kit this Christmas and give you a video of yourself singing “Yellow Submarine” in a clown costume the same day.
But back to elections and 2024. The reason I’m picking this as the Year of the Deepfake Elections is that, globally, over 50 countries are having elections in 2024. Canada, for the moment, is not one of them. But billions of Earthlings will vote in 2024, so it’s rather important that we know how much of the digital video and audio passing before our eyes and ears is real as opposed to concocted by AI labs on behalf of people who would like to “fix” an election. This would include the dreaded “foreign actors” we are told are tampering with our elections all the time. Never has it been so easy or so likely.
Since this seems rather important, I dug around to see if there are any accessible, reliable tools for knowing when you’re watching a deepfake and not the real article. What I found was a bit sad. Instead of some compact piece of brilliant electronic wizardry that I could point at the suspicious video, and that would then decree it “real” or “fake,” I was told the best way to avoid being fooled by deepfake material is to “watch things live.” If we’re talking elections, I assume this means I should go in person to speeches and debates. Failing that, I should watch live broadcasts. Otherwise, given a delay between a speech or debate and when I watch it, deepfakers could slip in and rejig their candidate’s dumbest statements into something smarter—or meddle with their opponents’ clips and soundbites to make them seem as stupid as possible.
In a nation 7,500 km wide, voters don’t get to live-attend much during a federal election. People with jobs and parenting duties find it hard as well to watch live TV as opposed to repeats and news-hour summaries.
Another piece of advice for avoiding being fooled by the deepfake is to “watch their lips.” If the relationship between the lip action and the verbiage starts to look like Frodo Baggins speaking Mandarin, beware. But, having worked in documentary video for a large chunk of my life, I have to ask: what about audio and video that just happens to be out of sync? Is there not a risk of ditching an honest candidate because of a non-insidious technical screw-up?
So there it is, folks. That’s all the advice I could find for protecting us against the deepfake. Watch things live. Watch their lips. For the record, I do totally believe that we will never again experience an election where politicians aren’t made to appear on the internet saying things they never said. There may, however, be another line of defence. Why don’t we go back to noticing if a politician lies or not. If he/she lies, he/she will also cheat—using whatever technology is available. It’s primitive, I suppose, for this world of highly sophisticated technology. But I recommend it nonetheless.
Fred Stenson’s many books include the novels Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.
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