Deepfake videos threaten the world order

Political convulsions are visible everywhere in the western democratic world. On both left and right, debate has become increasingly febrile and ideological. Non-consensus is the new normal, and this provides fertile ground for abuse by malign actors who seek to undermine western democracies. They will do so more easily with the help of technology. The […]

Deepfakes threaten what make us human

A dangerous new risk to civil liberties is brewing online. And it starts with pornography. At the end of 2017, users of the Reddit website were abuzz. Someone calling themselves “deepfakes” was showing them how to use free artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create fake porn videos of celebrities. One of his early creations “starred” […]

Covid-19 and the evolution of state disinformation strategies

Covid-19 is a case-study of one of the great undiagnosed threats of our time. I am not referring to the virus itself – experts have long warned of the dangers of a novel coronavirus causing a global pandemic. In that respect, Covid-19 is not a ‘black swan event’. I am referring, instead, to the increasingly […]

Could Russian Race-Baiting Tear the US Apart?

In July 1983, an article entitled ‘Aids may invade India: Mystery disease caused by US experiments’ appeared in The Patriot, an obscure Soviet-sponsored publication printed in New Delhi. The piece made a bombshell accusation: that the AIDS virus had been invented by the US military as a biological weapon to kill black Americans. This genocidal […]

How You Can End up in Porn Without Even Knowing It

Nina Schick, the author of the new book “DEEPFAKES,” writes about the disturbing AI phenomenon deepfakes, and how it will wreak havoc on our civil liberties in the years to come. A dangerous new threat to civil liberties is brewing online—and it starts in porn. To be more precise, it starts in a new type […]

The Horror of Deepfake Nudes

Non-consensual porn isn’t a ‘woman’s issue’ — it shows that anyone’s identity can be hijacked. Martin Scorcese’s most recent film, The Irishman, told a story that spanned seven decades. Robert Di Niro and Joe Pesci starred, and in order to “de-age” them, Scorcese used a special three-rig camera and employed dedicated special effects artists for post-production […]

Don’t Underestimate the Cheapfake

Deepfakes didn’t disrupt the US election as many predicted. But cheapfakes had a banner year writes Nina Schick for the MIT Tech Review. On November 30, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao pinned an image to his Twitter profile.In it, a soldier stands on an Australian flag and grins maniacally as he holds a bloodied […]

Deepfake apps are here and we can’t let them run amok

Nina Schick and Henry Ajder for WIRED. Over the last five years, AI has seen rapid improvements in its ability to generate synthetic versions of people’s faces and voices – commonly known as deepfakes. Generating the earliest deepfakes required powerful computers and technical expertise, but deepfake creation is now being increasingly democratised via intuitive interfaces […]

The deepfake person behind a deluge of political conspiracy theories

By way of introduction, this is Martin Aspen. Can you tell that he is not real? Martin Aspen Deepfake Not only he is not real, but this photo is not ‘real’ either. This image is a ‘deepfake,’ meaning a piece of ‘synthetic media that was generated by artificial intelligence. It could have easily been downloaded […]