Kari Lake, a close ally of former president Donald Trump who is seeking the Senate seat in Arizona, was the target of a deepfake ad created by an online news site. Hank Stephenson has a finely tuned B.S. detector. The longtime journalist has made a living sussing out lies and political spin.
There was Kari Lake, the Republican Senate hopeful from Arizona, on his phone screen, speaking words written by a software engineer. Stephenson was watching a deepfake — an artificial-intelligence-generated video produced by his news organization, Arizona Agenda“When we started doing this, I thought it was going to be so bad it wouldn’t trick anyone, but I was blown away,” Stephenson, who co-foundedin 2021, said in an interview. “And we are unsophisticated.
“Fighting this new wave of technological disinformation this election cycle is on all of us,” Stephenson wrote in the article accompanying the clips. “Your best defense is knowing what’s out there — and using your critical thinking.”, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies digital propaganda and misinformation, said the Arizona Agenda videos were useful public service announcements that appeared carefully crafted to limit unintended consequences.
It was a potent message, Farid said, but it opened the door for Russia’s baseless claims that subsequent videos from Ukraine, which showed evidence of Kremlin war crimes, were similarly feigned.“For many years now we’ve been battling over what’s real,” he said. “Objective facts can be written off as fake news, and now objective videos will be written off as deep fakes, and deep fakes will be treated as reality.