philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election

No matter what happens with generative AI, its disruptive forces are already beginning to play a role in the fast-approaching US presidential race.

... Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician? 

There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It’s easy to generate a clone of someone’s voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.

“To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates,” Ajder says. “Video is really the next frontier in generative AI.” ...

That includes companies like Runway, Google, and Meta. Once one company releases a high-quality version of a text-to-video generative AI tool, we may see many others quickly release their own versions, as we did after ChatGPT was released. Farid says that nobody wants to get “left behind,” so these companies tend to just release what they have as soon as they can. ...

So what can be done about this problem? One solution is something called C2PA. This technology cryptographically signs any content created by a device, such as a phone or video camera, and documents who captured the image, where, and when. The cryptographic signature is then held on a centralized immutable ledger. This would allow people producing legitimate videos to show that they are, in fact, legitimate. ...

One last possibility for solving this problem would be to develop a sort of instant fact-checker for social media users. Aviv Ovadya, a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, says you could highlight a piece of content in an app and send it to a contextualization engine that would inform you of its veracity. ... You could have it cross-referenced with sources you can trust.” ... The problem, he says, is that many founders he has spoken with simply don’t see a lot of money in developing such a tool.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-generative-ai-deepfake-2024-us-presidential-election/