I warned beginning in January 2018 about a dangerous trend involving the use of AI video technologies to edit videos and place famous people into adult films. I said this not because of the content, but because the fact that the adult industry seemed to be naturally adopting this trend was a warning that it would come into popular use in the following years. I have written numerous pieces on this, and noted that given the power of this technology and its coming popularization, that it would be used to incriminate people with false evidence, to exonerate the guilty, and even to manufacture reasons for political instability and war.
An article from Wired.com discussed this phenomenon, how while most of the “deepfakes” right now are porn, their popularity continues to grow, and is already being used to cause political instability in other nations, including causing a near governmental crisis in Malaysia earlier this year.
The count is unlikely to be exhaustive, but the findings are a reminder that despite speculation about deepfakes destabilizing elections, the technology is mostly being used very differently, including as a tool for harassment. One worrying trend: Deeptrace says the tools needed to create deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated and more widely available.
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Ajder of Deeptrace plays down fears that a fake clip could significantly affect the 2020 election. But the startup’s report notes that growing awareness of the technology can fuel political deception.
In June, a Malaysian political aide was arrested after a video surfaced purportedly showing him having sex with the country’s minister of economic affairs. (Gay sex is illegal in Malaysia.) The country’s prime minister said the video was a deepfake, but independent experts have been unable to determine if the video was manipulated. “Deepfakes can provide plausible deniability,” Ajder says. (source)
The issue is not even pornography- that is the candy used to coat such a poisonous concept such as this form of AI that is being consumed by the public now.
The future is happening before us right now- the AI editing of video technologies, having now been popularized, is being used to attack people in sensitive political positions. It is a new twist on the infamous “honeypot” type trap, except that with the “honeypot” it requires a person to actually take part in scandalous activity, the deepfake does not require this- it only needs a person with the right software and some time.
A scandal involving deepfakes, as noted above, caused havoc in Malaysia. If it can cause havoc in a small southeast Asian nation, what is to say of the effects it could have on US elections?
The possibilities are limited only by one’s creativity.
There is a historical pattern in which the tools that man creates to liberate himself eventually come to enslave him, followed by different tools, and back to enslavement. This process seems to be repeating again, but given the intensity and depth of detail which AI can produce, what comes after this?
That is to be speculated on in the future. What matters for our discussion is that AI technolgies are already revolutionizing the current patterns of human betrayal, scandal, and deceit for political or economic game, not by providing different fundamental philosophies, but magnifying the effects through allowing a man to cover his deception better than ever.
This is not something of the “future”, but rather, you are living the future. 1984 is today and the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley is what we are stepping into, one video editor at a time.