We've Been Wrong to Worry About Deepfakes (So Far)

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

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4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

Deepfakes, videos generated or manipulated by artificial intelligence, allow people to create content at a level of sophistication once only available to major Hollywood studios. Since the first deepfakes arrived seven years ago, experts have feared that doctored videos would undermine politics, or, worse, delegitimize all visual evidence. In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr, a professor of history at Northwestern University, explores why little of this has come to pass. As realistic as deepfakes can be, people seem to have good instincts for when they are being deceived. But Immerwahr makes the case that our collective imperviousness to deepfakes also points to a deeper problem: that our politics rely on emotion rather than evidence, and that we don’t need to be convinced of what we already believe.

You can read Daniel Immerwahr’s essay inThe New Yorker’s first ever special issue about artificial intelligence—out now.

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Transcript

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0:47.5	So it's not every day that I get to hear someone make the argument that things actually aren't as bad as they seem, particularly when it comes to AI.
0:54.8	So why do you think that this is the case with deep fakes?
0:58.2	I mean, first I want to say that I used to be very nervous about deep fakes, but we've had
1:03.6	deep fake technology for, it's almost the seventh year anniversary of when we've known about
1:08.5	deep fakes. And they've been pretty good for much at that time.
1:11.4	And by pretty good, I mean, to my eyes, indistinguishable from reels. And we keep hearing that,
1:16.2	you know, at any moment the bomb is going to go off. But it's been seven years. And the things that
1:21.4	we've been worried about haven't happened, like dramatically haven't happened. So I think it's a
1:26.2	good time to ask the question, do we have the right worries?
1:34.4	That's Daniel Imervar, a professor of U.S. and global history at Northwestern University.
1:39.8	This week, the New Yorker published its first ever special issue about artificial intelligence.
1:45.2	In it, Imavar wrote a piece about deepfakes in American politics and culture.
1:49.8	Deepfakes as in, the technology that makes it possible to show public figures saying or doing just about anything.
	...

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