The Deepfake Technology Era: Reality Redefined
The Unreality of Deepfake Technology
We're in the dawn of the deepfake era, and it's murky at best. Deepfake technology leverages generative artificial intelligence to create images, audio, and videos of 'real people' saying and doing things that look genuine but are not.
Deepfakery can make a politician speak falsehoods, and put celebrities and ordinary folk alike in porno movies, leaving us to decipher deepfakes from reality.
"But AI will cure cancer "
Nobody denies that generative AI is a tremendous force for good, and we eagerly await the day when it will reveal the cure for all diseases and solve world hunger. In medicine, sophisticated AI already analyses vast data sets and identifies medical scan results with more accuracy than the human eye.
Meanwhile, malicious deepfakers have no such noble intentions. They use publicly available AI technology to create deepfakes that undermine the truth, spread misinformation, and pose one of the biggest threats to global cyber security.
Dirty Dough in the Deepfakery Bakery
Deepfakes are also generated for extortion, scamming, blackmail, and non-consensual sexual gratification by small organisations and lone individuals alike.
Deepfake technology is cheap and available to anyone with a decent computer. With very little financial outlay, personal 'justice' can be meted out, or money can be made.
Sam Altman: Buyer Beware
It seems strange that the corporations behind these highly disruptive AI platforms remain wholly unaccountable for how the public uses their technology.
Customers and users can use the technology however they like, but the corporation's hands stay clean. In May 2023, the US Senate grilled Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI's ChatGPT. In a doe-eyed speech straight out of the tech founder's Sincerity Playbook, he said, "'We' should all work together to regulate AI for the good of humanity". But it's too late, Sam. You released ChatGPT for free without putting a cyber condom on it first.
Altman added that ChatGPT users need to be vigilant and check for the authenticity of what they see, adding wistfully that this will become harder as AI becomes smarter.
So, it’s all on you, people. Buyer beware!
A Deepfake Litigation Bonanza
As with most things, when shit happens, it's down to ordinary Joe's to deal with it. While it is technically illegal, if your face appears on the body of someone in a porno movie that was created abroad, no police force or local legislation can help. If your art or music is stolen, misrepresented or corrupted, you’ve got a fight on your hands.
If you want the deepfake removed from circulation, dream on, pal. Meanwhile, law firms across the developed world are getting fat on deepfake litigation.
Facebook announced that it is working on deepfake identification tools. I have little faith, considering their woeful inability to respond effectively to years of complaints from people on their platform calling out online bullying, hate crimes and the promotion of suicide.
To understand how we got to a point where deepfakes can run riot, we need to know how we arrived here in a world where it is almost impossible to stop harmful deepfakery.
The Writing Was On The Wall: Facebook's IPO
It was May 2012. Fun's "We Are Young" was playing on the airwaves, London was preparing for the Olympics, and the people in our office cheered and whooped as Facebook floated. It was quite the historical moment, and we watched in real-time from London as Mark Zuckerberg stood like a strange rabbit in the headlights as the IPO made him worth $18 billion.
I asked my team if they were concerned that Facebook wasn't regulated. No one cared. The mantra was that handing over a little personal data was a fair exchange for free social media.
Big Tech and The East India Company
Big Tech started to resemble corporations on steroids. Corporations have existed in various forms for well over 400 years, initially tightly controlled by governments for societal good. However, in a masterful stroke of self-protection, The East India Company reshaped the corporation model in 1600, becoming a global monopolistic giant, more prosperous and powerful than many nation-states.
In 1844, the definition of the corporation was refined: liability from the individual passed onto the corporation. Essentially, no individual could be held liable for a corporation's actions. In Britain in 1855, shareholders were given further advantages as their personal assets were also protected from the consequences of the corporation's actions.
Fast forward 170 years to now, and not much has changed. It is rare for a corporation caught with its trousers metaphorically down to suffer the consequences of its actions. Big Tech is the East India Company of the modern age, and no government is powerful enough to stop them.
Too Big To Challenge
Facebook skewed elections for profit; it still enables misinformation to proliferate and allows scammers to exploit its system. Besides a little hand-wringing and well-scripted empty promises, social media corporations do nothing to protect children and adults from the harm their platforms inflict.
To stop unions from forming, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk brazenly use cartelian methods that would make Pablo Escobar proud. The two richest men on the planet can run penis-extension space programmes while refusing to pay decent wages and conform to fair labour and business practices.
In February 2024, in a failed attempt to reverse the 1935 act that made forming unions legal, Amazon joined Musk's SpaceX and Trader Joe in a lawsuit claiming that NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) is "unconstitutional". Wow.
Give It Up For AI. Yay.
Now, entering stage left, the AI companies operate under the same structure that allows Big Tech to flourish. They too remain largely unaccountable and unstoppable. Governments and lawmakers are already playing catch-up to stop malicious deepfakers.
It seems that little has changed for corporations in 400 years, but for us, our everyday reality is being altered.
Thank you for reading. I hope you found it enlightening and informative.
I’m a ghost blogger and writer, and shamelessly for hire. Press the brazen orange button if you need help with your words:
Go on. Press the button!
