#deepfakes

#deepfakes

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAI's new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synthetic videos. At the time of launch, the company said its guardrails prohibited the inclusion of living celebrities, but also declared that it didn't plan to police copyright violations unless owners explicitly opted out of granting permission. Consequently, the clips people shared were rife with familiar faces such as Pikachu and SpongeBob.

We live in an era where the difference between real and artificial no longer startles us. Every day, it's there buzzing behind our screens and selfies. From avatars to synthetic voices and AI-generated images, the fake has become familiar and is an accepted part of our techno diet. But the more interesting question to me isn't how these illusions are made, it's why we all so easily believe them.

To take president Donald Trump's word for it, America's cities are in ruins, forcing him to deploy federal troops to Portland, Washington DC, and Memphis. There's just one wrinkle - no one seems to be able to find any real evidence of the mass riots and anarchist violence that Trump and his supporters insist is destroying the nation. Luckily for them, that problem is easily solved with a little help from AI.

I'm sure the guys who came up with [social media] thought it was a great idea and, yeah, congratulations on your billions, but it has taken down a huge portion of humanity.

According to YouTube posts, the celebrity tributes were plentiful. They came from Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Post Malone, Dax, Lil Wayne, Jelly Roll, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and Imagine Dragons. But none of them were real. They were all generated using artificial intelligence. And they often featured fake thumbnail images that showed the artists in tears or with mournful expressions.

Many of these videos feature recognizable characters like SpongeBob cooking meth, raising the obvious question of whether the AI company was flagrantly ignoring copyright law. And as tons of Sora-made videos parodying Altman hit the web, including some that fake CCTV footage showing him committing crimes, the implication that the tech could easily be used to fabricate damaging videos of people without their permission couldn't be ignored.

The Friday video is only the latest jab in a duel that's come to epitomize the subterranean lows American political dialogue has reached. Trump has spent the past decade eroding political norms with a constant stream of name-calling, overstatements, outright lies and all-caps social media posts aimed at whoever crosses his mind. Newsom has recently responded in kind, with his own stream of rants and foul-mouthed social media posts, usually aimed at Trump or one of Trump's followers.

In case it hasn't been obvious enough, The Morning Show makes clear in "The Revolution Will Be Televised" that the dynamic shared between the series and its audience is very much the audience going "this show is insane, what could be more batshit than this?" and The Morning Show going "hold my beer." And then it does something like have the Iranian government go after Alex Levy with deepfakes.

A whopping 53 percent of just over 5,000 US adults polled in June think that AI will "worsen people's ability to think creatively." Fifty percent say AI will deteriorate our ability to form meaningful relationships, while only five percent believe the reverse. While 29 percent of respondents said they believe AI will make people better problem-solvers, 38 percent said it could worsen our ability to solve problems.