It's June 2021. President Biden is waking up. It's 6:10am in DC. In London, late morning. For the past four hours, Sky News, BBC, LBC and (gulp) GB News have all been retailing 'unconfirmed video footage of the U.S. President taking part in what appears to be a Satanic ritual that includes burning the American flag while masturbating'. Twitter's top three trends across the US and UK have all been variations of #ByeByeBiden, #NotMyPresident and #JoeyWankWank. Twitter isn't 100% gold, I'm afraid. The President is woken, with or without a heart-shot of adrenaline is unclear, and he is dragged downstairs to a 'situation room', where seven of his closest advisors are gathered round a table. "Mr President, please can you explain what the fuck this is?" growls one. Apprehensive and - as ever - confused, Biden glares at the screen. "Is it... is it some sort of magic box?" And as VP Harris navigates to the Don Trump Jnr tweet that started the dumpster fire - everyone takes a deep breath, and she clicks play. A masked, shirtless, grey-haired man can be seen entering a dimly-lit room. Some awful music plays in the background. More shirtless, aged men enter the frame and begin to form a circle. The shaky camera pans out a little. The first man removes his mask. It is Joe Biden. An American flag is then brought into the middle of the circle and - on the second attempt at striking a match - the fabric catches light. "Biden" is then seen to be reciting demonic Latin verses while masturbating. The terrible music continues. The video only lasts as long as it takes for each of the stars & stripes to burn. After thirty seconds, all eyes in the room are back on Biden. He's stood silent. Eyes wide. Mouth open. Internally, the President is half-puzzled as to whether he's simply failing to recollect a Super-PAC fundraiser or - as everyone hopes - this is a fake. Externally, fortunately, the look of puzzlement is interpreted as "Shitting hell, I wish I had a team of tech consultants who could've advised on, or prevented this... this very-realistic fake footage". Biden is fucked. The next week of media is going to be dominated by the footage. He knows it's probably fake. Maybe. But even if it is, it's already everywhere. All the Senators and Congressmen he'd arranged to meet in the run up to his Healthcare Bill are already firewalling. "I can't speak for The President. But if the video is genuine, I think he should step down." says one of his former friends. "Outraged!" tweets another. "An insult to every man, woman and child who died for this country!" The Western media, forever charged to 'get the scoop' - more so since TV and Newspapers came under pressure to deliver as quickly as the internet - have dropped any pretence at credibility. Instead they take the sourceless material and rubber-stamp it for broadcast. "But we don't know WHERE this footage came from?" screams the political hack at The Sun. "Well, make that the follow-up story then" barks the Editor, "just get the video on the website *now* before The Mirror beat us to it! Look! For fuck's sake it's on Sky News already! GO GO GO!" Biden doesn't have a team of high-ranking techies. Certainly none with the forethought to prevent or 'manage' this. The closest thing he had were a few fundraisers with the nice folks at Amazon and Microsoft. But none of them warned him. Why should they? It's not Microsoft's job to warn the President there might be some fake news out there. I mean, Jesus Christ, Biden's ancient. Wasn't he around in 2016? He's the oldest-looking five year-old I've ever seen. The world had watched (in bemusement) the fake, Russian-produced 'news' shows that claimed Hillary was running a pedophile pizza place. That's actually where "Fake News" started. So how could The President and his circle not see this coming!? How could nobody see, what was in plain sight, that in a world where foreign powers are happy to distort and disrupt the Western democratic process, that they might attempt to use Deep Fake / AI to make him look like a weird, wanky, flag-burning Drake fan? [yes, the music in the background was Drake and sorry that was such a slow burner] What would happen next in that horrible Black Mirror-esque scenario? Would Biden have to resign? Could he credibly say he definitely wasn't there and that the footage is AI? Who would believe him? How could he prove it? What even *is* 'real' if every piece of footage or audio can be re-certified as 'meh that shit's a deep fake, bro'. Would "Tucker" and the rest of the Fox crew, and the MAGA-hats accept "it wasn't me" as a defence? Or would they go for the jugular: "The truth is, we don't think Joe Biden really knows for sure whether that footage is real because he can barely remember what he had for breakfast". There would be two camps of Deep Fake believers. The MAGAs would buy it because Trump Jnr tweeted it. The floating voters would believe it because... well, for similar reasons to the endurance of Brexit, many simply don't want to believe they could've possibly been conned. It's the "I believe it's real, because to believe that it's fake would mean believing *I* could be tricked." mentality. But back to 2020. None of that has happened yet. Everything is fine (lol). Deep Fake is still just porn and a few funny instagram 'stories' here and there. Sure, we saw an explosion on TikTok and Facebook recently. But by and large "Deep Fake" is still a phrase you're more likely to happen across in a think-piece about CGI-looking, celebrity sex tapes - than a dystopian political sink-hole. Insta wise, you must be aware that RefaceAI released a mass-market app a couple of months back. As of about July this year, you probably started seeing little clips of your friend's face on Shakira's body, shimmying along or on a Britney vid or something. I admit when I first saw Reface, I was a bit blown away. It's like Snapchat filters have a hotter, younger sister now. But that was before I considered the ramifications and where this technology is headed. From Funny Apps To Political Meltdown On the face of it (NPI), what's not to like? Your wife gets to pretend she's Shakira for a bit. Even better, you get to pretend your wife is Shakira for a bit. Everyone sees what is the latest chapter of internet narcissism after the Ice Bucket Challenge, selfies and face-swap filters - we all have a quick laugh and go back to our Superhero movies. Big fucking wow, right? But pan out a little and remember the context of this. The era it's hitting us. In May 2019, a YouTube channel called Dessa uploaded Deep Fake audio of Joe Rogan. It was 100% AI generated, and to prove it wasn't mere samples all sewn together, they had "Joe" talking about a fictional hockey team comprised entirely of chimps. It is - by my estimation - about 95% indistinguishable to an authentic Joe Rogan audio clip. It sounds slightly grainy, sure, but no worse than snippets that have been downloaded and/or encoded poorly. If Deep Fake audio was at that level in May 2019 and we're now nearly through 2020. And Deep Fake video is at - again, by my estimation - about 30-50% indistinguishable, then I don't think it's outrageous to suggest we're about 1-2 years away from realistic looking video, with accompanying audio, of something bad - and it will cause significant political problems. Presumably, keen to avoid future blame, RefaceAI have provided an API to Facebook that would allow Team Zuck to 'detect' videos that were produced by its software. I suppose the calculation is that, when a Deep Fake of Trump or Biden is uploaded, Facebook will auto-tag or flag that it was "produced by Deep-Fake Software" or something. And that would put out the fire, before it got out of hand. Well, that's great for RefaceAI. But I'd imagine they're one in a sea of Deep Fake firms out there. And that there's an onus on Facebook to do more than just happily receive an API. I'd speculate that as the publishing platform that's putting out footage (/allowing footage to be put out) - that it is their responsibility to grade and promote videos / blogs / articles etc, based on where they came from. Not just one piddly app's 5 second clips. They should flag videos as 'sourceless' or 'fucking dodgy' if they fail to provide a 'certificate' or user key or 'secret' payload. If a video is published by NYT, it should carry with it a signature and their various stories should be annually graded, and that should decide how often they're promoted the following year. I mean, apart from the wider journalism regulation piece, if we're giving Facebook an API in the hope they'll use it to manage information integrity, what are we basing that hope on? They've never flagged and tagged things as shady before. Why are we expecting them to behave themselves now with Deep Fakes? I've never worked for Facebook but I can't imagine a situation where a tech corp like that makes billions of dollars, but can't find a team of six developers to build a CMS in a month. It can't be *that* hard to setup a portal like that, where publishers who like having their stuff shared on the world's most popular platform, register and verify themselves as "The Washington Post" or "CNN" or whatever. With articles promoted and graded / verified. With "AltRightNews.ru was registered in St Petersburg and is unverified" strings. Maybe they could go one further and grade domestic publications by fact checking. You might counter "Well, why would Facebook bother to do that?". I would counter back: why would they not? As it stands, they've failed spectacularly to behave like a publisher. Probably because their business is, in fact, "data sales". So at time of writing, I can still in 2020 create a page that looks almost exactly like The Guardian, host it on a domain that costs £7, called theGaurdian.co.uk, write a story with the headline "Kier Starmer Admits To Sexually Abusing Livestock" and share it - and to most (casual) readers it would be a credible news source telling them that. Facebook seems to have itself caught in some weird, paradoxical cross-hairs right now. Where apps are so impressive they can foster AI-generated videos with Putin rapping along to Spice Girls, and yet it's seemingly still impossible to verify news. So with the apparatus as it is, the inevitability of a Deep Fake political scandal, Biden, Boris Johnson or whoever unaware, no one policing the misinformation, the Culture War in fifth gear, the world distracted by a Pandemic - it's a perfect storm for this thing to erupt. Outside of Facebook And remember, all we've talked about is Facebook. What if the flag-burning video is hosted or shared on an entirely different platform? YouTube, Vimeo, Reddit or Twitter. Take your pick. On Twitter, why is it still possible in 2020 to create a profile using an image that could easily be checked hasn't simply been lifted from Google Images? Why is it so hard to cross check that the supposed 'city' of the new user matches the GPRS of the phone creating the account? This is pretty basic stuff. And it would dramatically reduce the amount of fake profiles, the bot farms and so on. The probability that a scandal is going to happen is high. And the only way around it (as far as I can see) is to have some sort of Institute of Internet Integrity or something. A publicly-funded, non-partisan body, whose job it is to certify and remove content if it falls below standards. It should be equipped with the powers to punish, restrict or fine a media or social media organisation, if it publishes or re-publishes (or fails to acknowledge faked) content like a sourceless Biden flag-burning video. And you may think "Well yes, that would solve it, so let's just do that". But we're now at such a volatile, unreasonable stage in the Culture War that even a "politically neutral, publicly-funded, non-partisan body" would be seen, itself, as conceptually biased. Because (and perhaps I'm showing my naiveté here a little) if The Right have the most to lose from policing misinformation, then you can guarantee they would oppose it. It would be framed as an assault on Freedom of Speech, or as some corrupt, Commie 'Ministry of Govt-Approved News'. That's how deep the rot has set in. From the Tories in London to the Repbs in DC - they would *all* oppose an independent body whose sole purpose was to keep the political conversation honest. "Oh yeah? Well who funds 'em!" they would tweet. "Unbiased!? The guy that runs it went to college with Bill Clinton!" some pink-cheeked bell-end on Breitbart would cry. Now, you may say "Conspiracy Theories and fake news are, themselves, non partisan issues, Aid". And that's true on a base-level. Anyone can dream up a conspiracy. Anyone can write/believe a fake news article. But if we look at, say, the last five years as the opening chapters to where the future's headed, it does look like an almost-exclusively Right-wing problem. It is The Right who dreamt up "Obama's a Kenyan Muslim!". It is the Right who propelled the fantasy of Brexit. It is the Right who hyped the Pedo Pizza Parlour and Q-Anon. It is The Right who portrayed the victims of school shootings as 'crisis actors'. Lefty conspiracies, by contrast, seem to manoeuvre around "Who REALLY Killed JFK?", "Dude, my cousin Mike got abducted by aliens once" and yes, of course, the odd Labour Party dabble in Anti-Semitism. Though let's keep this honest: there's something more than just a little Right-wing about "hating Jews". So, if (let's say as a guesstimate) 90% of the bots, the fake news, conspiracies and the "Russian interference" is designed to benefit Trump, push Brexit or harm Labour / Democrats - I think it's fair to assume that saying "Let's Police The Misinformation" would be considered 'a threat' by the Right. And given right now, in late September of 2020, it is the Right in power on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't see the Institute of Internet Integrity being a priority. Even in my most opulent fantasies, ones where Boris Johnson or Donald Trump suddenly grow a conscience, and agree it's a problem just as likely to knock on their doors as their rivals - it would still not happen in the window of time we have left.
