AI deepfakes – highly realistic yet manipulated or fabricated content that falsely depicts real people doing or saying things they never did – endanger democracy itself.
With the recent explosion of AI, dazzling images, videos, audio and texts can now be easily generated by anyone with just a few simple inputs. While this technology offers many astonishing benefits, it also poses significant dangers.
Among the most pernicious of these is the creation of deepfakes – highly realistic yet manipulated or fabricated content that falsely depicts real people doing or saying things they never did. Our ability to discern fact from fiction, along with democracy itself, are in the crosshairs.
In recent months, deepfakes have entered the mainstream like never before. In February, ads on Facebook and Instagram were discovered using AI videos falsely depicting Piers Morgan, Oprah Winfrey, and other celebrities endorsing pseudo-scientific self-help courses.
In January, Taylor Swift was the victim of deepfake pornography, as fake explicit images of the pop star flooded Twitter/X, garnering millions of views.
Celebrities are far from the only victims. Regular people, especially women and girls, are increasingly targeted. A study reported by MIT Technology found that 96% of deepfake videos online were pornographic and nonconsensual, nearly all targeting women.
NBC News recently reported that middle school students in Beverly Hills, California, were found creating and circulating deepfake nude photos of their classmates. Similar incidents are occurring in high schools across the country.
As this tech rapidly improves, Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who researches deepfake detection, said, “We are going to see a tsunami of these AI-generated explicit images.”
Deepfakes are putting democracy itself at risk. The U.S., U.K. and about 70 nations encompassing almost half the global population have national elections this year.
These will be the first elections in which sophisticated deepfake tech is readily accessible not just to government entities and nefarious actors, but to anyone in the world with a phone or laptop.
We’ve seen previews of deepfake interference in the political arena. A viral deepfake video in 2022 falsely depicted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proclaiming to surrender.
