deep fakes

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will host a hearing entitled "The National Security Challenge of Artificial Intelligence, Manipulated Media, and ‘Deepfakes’" at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday. A video of the hearing is available below.

Back in February, we joined forces in this post to draw attention to the wide array of dangers to individuals and to society posed by advances in “deep fake” technology (that is, the capacity to alter audio or video to make it appear, falsely, that a real person said or did something). The post generated a considerable amount of discussion, which was great, but we understood we had barely scratched the surface of the issue.

Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have painted a truly depressing picture of a future in which faked video and audio cannot be distinguished from the real thing. And I think they are right to be depressed about it, though I want to discuss a possible technological solution that they did not address.