“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”
Imagine that R2-D2 hadn’t actually been beaming a grainy, bluish holographic recording of Princess Leia asking for help. Imagine the alternative possibilities if it had been a manufactured Sith trick to lure the Jedi and Co. into a trap.
Back in 1977, it totally could have happened … in science fiction.
But nowadays, Leia, or Carrie Fisher — or anyone, really — can show up nearly anywhere. From Coachella, like holographic Tupac Shakur did in 2012, to the White House, like this “Obama” video that’s been making the rounds online recently. (The video is actually actor/director/comedian Jordan Peele’s voice, combined with existing video of Obama and software magic.)
Welcome, my friends, to “deepfakes,” where existing audio, video, and photos can be blended with software magic to create seamless media, video particularly. Where people will say or do things, or events can unfold, that never actually happened. Faked to order to fit whatever your agenda might be, from politics to porn.
For the moment such tools are in the hands of a trained and talented few, but they are ever-evolving, and soon the technology could serve just about anyone’s mission or mischief, per this piece in The Atlantic on “The End of Reality”:
“One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required.”
As the joke goes: “‘Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet’ – Abraham Lincoln.” Presumably we’ll soon have video of Lincoln saying it, amended to: “Don’t believe anything on the Internet.”
So what happens when we can’t trust any media? Real journalism is under threat. Never has it been easier for anonymous randos to spread ”truth” or “news.” And now anyone with a few minutes and some processing power will be able to create sources to back up their “reporting.”
It begs the very fundamental question of what reality is, at least online. Humans are gifted with a limited number of senses to perceive and process the world, and the ones that we use online can no longer be trusted.
We’ve long relied on a “common” model of reality. If enough people accept and believe it, it’s real. Which is not to say we haven’t gotten it very wrong before. (Hello, witch hunts!)
Our society also continues to lose commonality the more time we spend alone in front of our screens or come together online for violent disagreements rather than quality discourse.
We’re shooting ourselves in the virtual foot when it comes to relying on each other for community-based values and norms checks.
Presumably tools are being developed to help detect deepfakes, but we all know that subversive innovation usually stays two steps ahead.
Are we left to rely on our own judgement? Kinda hope not. Science has shown us how unreliable human memory is, how prone we are to biases, and how likely our brains are to fill in data gaps to create the patterns they so crave. We also tend to be our most stubborn and confident when we’re most wrong.
So if we can’t reliably analyze media, I guess that leaves us two options online: believe everything or believe nothing.
If you believe everything, you’ll be easily and often manipulated by the highest media bidder or most skilled technician. Your opinions and beliefs will either constantly morph based on what you’re shown, or they’ll calcify because you only subject yourself to content that conforms to what you already believe.
But at the same time, with your steady stream of media exposure, you’ll likely think you’re well-informed and making better decisions than those Luddites who refuse to consume “tainted” media and thus never learn anything about what’s going on in the world.
What the average person chooses to believe usually doesn’t matter a huge amount, societally speaking, especially if they’re passive actors.
But what the citizens of a country, for example, choose to believe when it comes to, say, elections, can have major consequences. As can the chosen beliefs of influential members of governments, the military, law enforcement, corporations, extremist groups ...
We have seen plenty of times, largely thanks to the internet, how far and fast information can spread. Public opinion can act as judge, jury, and executioner before we even really know what actually happened (if we ever find out).
Just as you can’t un-ring a bell, you can’t un-dox an activist, un-murder a victim, or un-overthrow a government.
So what if we refuse to believe anything? Then we’re just basing our beliefs on a vacuum of ignorance rather than an overflowing and flaming dumpster of it.
Most of us have lots of information, experience, and biases in our heads, which already affect what we think, say, do, and believe all the time (unless you’re a newborn).
If we decide to stop believing input now, it just means that we’ll continue to work from the dataset we have, which will become increasingly out of date and warped due to the decaying nature of memory.
We’ll also likely cling to it ever more stubbornly over time, as we do when we refuse to switch up our 20-year-old hairstyles, 30-year-old musical tastes, or 50-year-old political ideologies.
This is about as useful as unquestioningly swallowing every last word and pixel that appears before our eyes.
So what do we do? Well, it’s always valuable to ask yourself: who benefits from this? There is minimal real altruism in the world. (If money or power are involved, especially online, there’s none.)
Support independent voices, those who have little to gain by supporting either side in any situation that appears to have clearly defined “sides.” Of course, what is independent and what the sides are can be difficult to determine sometimes without the necessary education.
I don’t know where you learn critical thinking and analysis these days. I hope in school? I haven’t been a student recently.
Rebuilding our community-based realities with people who share passion and initiative is also a good idea, though we gravitate to those who think and believe as we do, and we need to the exact opposite. So be aware.
Or, I dunno, permanently strap on a VR headset. At least with that you’ll know it’s not real. At least until your memory tricks you into blissful oblivion.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached on Twitter at @melle or by email at me@melle.ca.
