Kiss Your Reality Goodbye
Deepfake News Anchors fuel fires in an already desynchronized society.
From a piece in Forbed about how AI Makes Real News Anchors Report Fake Stories:
This week, a real video of CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward ducking for cover from rockets near the Israel-Gaza border went viral with fake audio undermining her reporting. Earlier this month, an AI-generated clip of CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King, promoting a product she’d never used or even heard of, was circulating online. A deepfake of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, stating that former president Donald Trump was “ripping us a new asshole,” also recently went viral after Trump and his son shared it on Truth Social and Twitter."
On my old blog i had a knack for running jokes, using the same fun or ironic line in every post about a given subject. For stuff related to computer vision and AI and reality distortions due to outrage economics on social media, i commonly used "Kiss your reality goodbye" as a cynical closing sentence to remind every reader that, as impressive as style transfer and early image generators might look, the implications of digital technology being able to transform every bit of information into a fluid substance which is editable by the masses, would also introduce a new blurriness to our perception of reality. It's unnerving to see this joke unfold into mass media now.
In The Problem With Counterfeit People, Daniel Dennett said that "counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history", and deepfaked news anchors surely are one of the more important instances of what he meant.
These are particularly dangerous because news anchors, usually highly visible journalists in any society, are trusted professionals whose job it is to spread facts and narratives which synchronize whole demographics. That is the main function of mass media: Synchronize discourse.
Dennett continues:
Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization. Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed. By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us. Counterfeit people, by distracting and confusing us and by exploiting our most irresistible fears and anxieties, will lead us into temptation and, from there, into acquiescing to our own subjugation. The counterfeit people will talk us into adopting policies and convictions that will make us vulnerable to still more manipulation. Or we will simply turn off our attention and become passive and ignorant pawns. This is a terrifying prospect.
Yes, and: It’s not just the “economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments“ who will controll our attention by creating deepfaked news anchors who are, again, synchronizers of the whole of society and who, as the vocal and visual bearers of the news, play a crucial part in the formation of discourse, and which route it will take. It’s also a million partisans using democratized, cheap and easy tech to spread exaggerated versions of their perspectives of the world.
The more we rely on digital media to look beyond our own social circles of close friends and neighborhoods to see “what’s happening in the outside world“, the more we rely on insecure information, and cheap AI-deepfakes of news anchors which are easier and easier to produce pose unseen dangers of manipulating your perspectives on that outside world, much more so than the fake news a few years ago, cheaply produced with a wordpress blog and spread by fueling the outrage economy or simply by employing an army of sockpuppet accounts on the socmed.
Faking news anchors is different from faking other people, because they serve as trusted multiplyers of news — and introducing deepfakes of highly visible journalists is going directly for the backbone of society.
With democratized publishing on the web, we did away with the gatekeepers of yore, giving everyone a voice which already gave rise to a cacophony of voices, often drowning out the real for the sake of outrage. As important as it is that we now can see and hear more voices from marginalized minorities, this democratization also created a world in which attention econonimcs paramount everything, and in the process we found out that emotionality win at that game every single time, further drowning out often dry and boring truths.
One way to counter this development was and is to strengthen experts in the field, the former gatekeepers, to make visible the scientific truths, common sense policies and their debunkings of desinformation. Deepfaked News Anchors go directly against this strengthening effort and will fuel the fires even more, even faster.
No matter where you stand politically, i can deepfake a Rachel Maddow or a Tucker Carlson and wreak havoc, because their voices will go miles before anything is debunked. The Hamas-War in Israel already is a hotbed for unseen levels of desinformation, now imagine a deepfaked Tucker Carlson calling for genocide in Gaza or AI-Rachel Maddow defending the slaughter of israeli kids at a rave, maybe one day before an election. The danger here is not just corporations controling mimetic AI-humans, as Dennett fears, but extremely partisan tribe warriors equipped with open source technology available to everyone who are motivated not by money, but ideology.
When these deepfake news anchors profilerate, further erosion of trust in the media is a given, which already is at an alltime low. Mass media might very well lose it's critical sociological function to synchronize societal discourse along topics and narratives, because nobody trusts anything anymore.
We were already heading in this direction with a billion fractured tribes on social media, and counterfeit news anchors just fuel that fire manifold, due to the critical function that news anchors serve in modern societies which are synchronized by mass media.
So i guess it's time to reintroduce the old tradition on my new blog too:
Kiss your reality goodbye.