Can you believe your eyes? How deepfakes are coming for politics | Financial Times
data_society's bookmarks 2019-10-24
Summary:
Mutale Nkonde was quoted in a Financial Times story about AI-generated videos {Carolyn: here are Mutale's parts of the story}:
One way to deal with this would be through enacting clear regulation. Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, was among those involved in helping draft the Defending Each and Every Person from False Appearances by Keeping Exploitation Subject (DEEPFAKES) to Accountability Act.
“It became incredibly important to enter a piece of legislation,” she says. “As we move towards 2020, we may be subject to supposed video evidence and we need a way of identifying what may look real [but is not].” She says that there are fears that both China and Iran could turn to deepfakes as a tool to attack the US.
Yet these dangers have to be dealt with in the framework of Section 230. The compromise for Nkonde and her colleagues was to treat deepfakes as a consumer-rights issue, making it about fraudulent representation.
The DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, referred to the subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security in June, would make deepfakes for purposes such as fake porn, disinformation or election interference illegal.
Those synthetic videos produced for purposes such as parody or education would need to be watermarked. But Nkonde says that even as someone who helped draw up the bill, she now questions its feasibility.
“The issue with watermarking . . . is the technical architecture completely changes the video,” she says. “It’s a completely new piece of video.” Trying to prove something is a fake without reference to the “real” footage would be extremely hard. She also worries that watermarking would lead to false positives, or that canny developers could try to have real videos flagged as deepfakes.
“We may end up having to actually favour some type of ban or moratorium until we get further research in all the different ways [videos] could be falsified,” she suggests. “We’re falling foul to how fast tech is moving.”
10/23/2019, Financial Times