Fakes,, Deepfakes, Firehoses

Tim Harford wrote a thought provoking piece on the many similarities, lessons and warnings from a form of fake’ness that’s been around for far longer than social media – art forgeries.

 

He bases this on things said and done by a master art forger named Eric Hebborn. In his autobiography, he declared that a Brueghel painting in the New York Mets Museum was a fake that he’d created. The museum wasn’t happy:

“We don’t believe it’s a forgery, and we believe that the story told by Mr. Hebborn in this book is not true.”

Was the museum lying because it didn’t want to admit it had been conned? Was the forger lying to grab headlines? How does one know what the truth is?

 

This problem applies to fake everything today. Is that video of a politician or actor saying or doing something real? Or is it a fake as those folks claim?

 

There are fakes and then there are deepfakes.

“Deepfake AI is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing image, audio and video hoaxes.”

While deepfakes, and fear of the damage they can do, grab the headlines, they’re still very hard. In fact, says Harford:

“There are easier ways to lie with video.”

 

The easiest way is to “misdescribe” an existing video. Take a video of ISIS throwing people off a building from years back and describe it as a video of Hamas throwing Israeli hostages yesterday. Or take two video clips and combine them to create the appearance of an “event” that never happened. Such fakes are much easier to create, and much harder to prove. The creator of one such merged-video fake involving Hillary Clinton and the WWE wrestler, the Rock, was actually stunned people believed it:

“Wait,” the troll told Grothaus. “These dumb shits think this is real?”

As Harford wrote in response to that rhetorical question from the troll:

“They did indeed. They — we — are busy. We’re distracted. We instinctively feel that some stuff is too good to check. And so we’ll accept lies that really should give us pause.”

 

Some experts argue the fear of fakes is overplayed. With time, we’ll start to recognize them more easily, they argue. When the printing press was invented, didn’t people have the same fears? But things didn’t end badly just because anyone could spread info easily, they contend.

 

That’s certainly possible. Alternately, as Harford says, a rising cynicism, a tendency to doubt and question everything, may not be a good outcome either:

“If we’re shown enough faked videos of atrocities, or of political gaffes, we might start to dismiss real videos of atrocities and real videos of political gaffes, too. It’s good to be sceptical, but if we are too sceptical then even the most straightforward truths are up for debate.”

 

Another aspect about fakes, writes Harford, is the “fire hose of falsehood” strategy. The aim is not to come up with a lie that is believable. Rather, just flood the Internet with that content – if it is repeated enough, talked about enough, it starts to appear more and more real. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister, famously captured that aspect:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Or, even if that doesn’t happen, it can still piss off many to tune off from news altogether. And no, even that isn’t a new strategy:

“(From Mao’s time) many manipulated photographs are supposed to look manipulated.”

Huh? Why? Because once you recognize a fake photo, the idea has been sown in your head that any photo can be a fake.

“Once there are enough lies around, it’s easy to start doubting… well, everything.”

Even though:

“Maybe that Brueghel really is a Brueghel. Maybe the Da Vinci is just a Da Vinci.”

 

This is like chess. Every move has a countermove. How many moves ahead can you see? Is there no way out then? I don’t know, so I’ll end with this tongue-in-cheek “prophecy” by the physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson: