Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/25/nixon-deepfaked-to-read-his-pr.html
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I remained convinced that deepfakes are being pushed/developed to provide plausible deniability for some truly heinous “home videos” of various political elites around the world.
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We are dissolving reality.
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Cool!
Now I have a list of some other speeches I’d like to hear…
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I think we are returning reality to what it was for all but an incredibly brief period of human history where we strangely believed we could have truth without trust.
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This is my thought.
Just more “proof” for the moon landing hoax people. Seems necessary.
But if the moon landing was faked, how could they die on the moon if they never landed on the moon?
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To me the interesting thing about “deepfakes” is not that it changes our fundamental relationship with truth (because it doesn’t). The interesting thing is people talking as if we were witnessing the invention of lying.
A lot of people have never seriously considered that you can’t separate “the truth” from the process by which we learn the truth. And some may feel embarrassed to have lived their entire lives up to 2016 without really understanding something so basic and important. So maybe “deepfakes” is a kind of codeword for “remedial pre-K media literacy”.
Someone less salty than me might argue that for a while, we really did have a Fourth Estate that was honorable enough that you could take their word as an adequate sketch of The Way Things Are. Either way, that sure isn’t the case now.
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I wonder if in the future people will wonder how we thought “deepfakes” were convincing. Think of all the “photographs” of fairies and ghosts that Victorian people were convinced by that look like the obvious fakes that they are to us today. As people get more familiar with technology they get better at finding fakes.
Same. The dystopian epoch is truly upon us.
[Points at Bigfoot, Lock Ness and UFO photos]
I’m not convinced we have come very far from Victorian fakes.
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Conversely, there are plenty of conspiracy theorists who look at a photo of Neil Armstrong standing on the moon or Lee Harvey Oswald posing with a rifle or an airplane hitting the World Trade Center and say “how could anyone possibly be naive enough to believe THAT was real?”
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OK I can see how this is problematic now. The problem won’t be with very obvious fakes, but with subtle ones. Nixon did have this speech prepared and if you google it you will find people saying that. So there’s some truth to it. It’s this reality gray area. Maybe not this specifically because people are writing about it, but if this were done in a less publicized way with small historical details. Video could just be uploaded to the web without explanation and accidentally spread.
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It’s also problematic because it provides more deniability to those who are prone to deny evidence of inconvenient truths.
When someone like Trump claims “I never said that” and his critics respond with “yes you did, here’s the video” he can just cry “deepfake news!” and his followers will swallow it without question. No need for the memory-hole approach from 1984 when you can retroactively declare documented history as a fabrication.
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“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside. Run, he’s fuzzy, get out of here.”
— Mitch Hedberg
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When you try and make a cool thing and someone beats you to it :-/ sorry for you Beschizza lol
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