ALERT: Why ‘bombshell’ deepfake video days before election is a threat
We’ve been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence for decades, and now it’s finally here.
Most recently, the state-run media went nuts over an AI-generated image of Donald Trump in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform, but that’s not the kind of “deepfake” that Americans should be concerned about.
“Deepfake images, audio and video, are reaching a level of sophistication that far surpasses anything we’ve seen before now,” Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Program” says, reading from his new book, “Propaganda Wars.”
This is a massive issue, especially considering that there are more elections happening simultaneously across the globe than ever before in human history.
“We’re one of the last,” Glenn says. “So have deepfakes been used in the last year? Yes. Warning, usually in the last day or two because there’s not enough time to combat it. So right before everybody goes in for the final day, something is released on one of the candidates, and it shows them doing something or saying something.”
And this has already happened in America.
Just last year in Chicago, there was a mayoral race that was extremely contentious between Brandon Johnson and Paul Valas.
Right before one of the rounds of primary voting, a deepfake audio of Valas was released in which he was flippantly discussing cops killing people as if it were a good thing.
“None of this was true. It was a deepfaked audio; none of it was real, but it circulated widely right before the election, and Brandon Johnson ended up doing a lot better than people thought,” Justin Haskins, co-author of “Propaganda Wars,” tells Glenn.
Johnson, who is African-American, then went on to win the race.
“Johnson was the anti-establishment, socialist candidate, presented himself to the African-American community as ‘I’m going to represent you,’ and here you had audio of the other candidate saying, ‘I don’t care if black people get killed by cops,’” Haskins says.
“There’s no way of actually tracking the specific correlation between this and the outcome of the race; it’s just not possible. But that’s the whole point. It creates all sorts of uncertainty and confusion, and we don’t know how many people were impacted by this. Maybe not enough to swing the election, but maybe it was enough to swing the election,” he adds.
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