Deepfakes: The Danger is Now
When former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo first took to the booth as a commentator for CBS in 2017, he was a broadcasting oracle. “Here comes a run to the left,” he said, seconds before Raiders quarterback David Carr handed the ball off left to Marshawn Lynch. What seemed like a crystal ball in the broadcasting booth was in fact an understanding of situational football: if you understood the situation — down, distance, personnel — you could have a pretty good sense of where the ball was going.
Dedicated 49er fan though I am, I’m going to channel Tony Romo with an alarm for American political life: With election day looming, the possibility of a deepfake attack in the coming days is all too real.
Our team at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group Foundation is sufficiently concerned about deepfakes to have put together our own small defensive effort, together with the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley — The “Deepfake Education Competition” — to help increase public awareness of the problem. (You can check out our announcement of the winners here.)
I wish predicting a deepfake attack suggested some keen insight on my part. It’s doesn’t. Leaders in technology and government have been warning about the potentially devastating damage of deepfakes for several years. Until recently, though, the danger has been more potential than proximate. The technology was not quite good enough to be convincing — and what little was convincing was accessible only to a small cadre of state actors who could be easily identified and targeted for retaliation.
That is no longer the case. The situation we face over the next few days constitutes what might be a high point in the danger of a deepfake attack on the United States, for a simple reason: The cost of such an attack has never been lower, and the damage it could inflict might never again be as great as it is this year.
The technology used to produce deepfakes is cheaper and more effective than ever. Unlike just a few years ago, high quality video forgeries today can come from lone wolf actors as easily as from rogue states. That means many more potential aggressors to defend against, with malicious actors constantly innovating to evade new deepfake detection tools. The proliferation of potential attackers also means that attributing responsibility is more difficult, making the potential retaliation that might have deterred state actors a few years back less effective.
Meanwhile, the potential damage of a deepfake attack remains high. Even were the public sensitized to the threat (it’s not), relying on the naked eye to detect deepfakes is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. To test your own ability to discern genuine video, check out the Detect Fakes page from MIT. If my own poor performance says anything about the general public’s ability to detect fake video, we are in big trouble.
Over the next four years, as deepfakes are deployed for commercial application and the public gets more familiar with the technology through the media and consumer tech, we’ll likely be more skeptical of video, and hence resilient to malicious deepfakes. That skepticism will bring its own challenges for our democracy and the broader information ecosystem, but it will likely make it more difficult to hoodwink the public with fabricated video by the time the 2024 election is upon us.
If Tony Romo were calling this election from the booth, we’d be hearing this: “Watch for the deepfake.” That Tony Romo would see the situation around this election for what it is: a closing window when the gap between the low cost of launching a deepfake attack and the potentially significant damage it could inflict yawns perhaps as large as it ever will.
If there is one takeaway from the winning videos in our Deepfake Education Competition, it is that right now, you and I are the best defense against a deepfake attack. What we choose to believe, and what we choose to share, will determine how we fare in the coming days. With that in mind, it’s worth considering a simple discipline as Election Day approaches: For the next week or so, get a night’s sleep before you forward any videos on social media. It’s not too much to ask, when the situation demands.
