“The weaponisation of deepfakes against politicians or nation states has become something we’re simply going to have to live with,” says Michael Grothaus. Author of ‘Trust No One’, an investigation into the nature, origins and future of the deepfake video. Grothaus thinks that the days of innocent ‘face-swapping’ for the amusement of the YouTube audience, or even the merging of celebrities into pornographic videos, have dramatically transformed into “a real threat.”
When the public can routinely view plausible videos of events that haven’t taken place, globally distributed across social media channels, he says, “you start to see the erosion of trust in society. People will become more cynical and will start to think that everything they see is fake. So it is more essential than ever to understand the dark origins of deepfakes. The more deepfakes spread, the less we will be able to tell if the videos we are watching are authentic.”
There was a time when...