The dangers of Deepfakes

BY ETHAN BUTT Staff Reporter

Biden, Trump and Obama are now on TikTok and Instagram streaming their Discord calls while playing video games. At least that’s what the creators want you to think. These presidential Discord calls are just a few examples of the seemingly harmless Deepfake, essentially videos that use artificial intelligence technology to mimic the voices of people such as famous celebrities and make them say whatever the creator wants. In this case, the voices of Biden, Trump and Obama on call while playing video games.

“I personally think they’re funny especially in an ironic sort of sense, like having a Republican say the most democratic thing or having a homophobe saying gay rights and I love gay people,” sophomore Habib Parduhn said.

If you didn’t know you were watching a deepfake video, it would have taken a while for you to figure out that it was fake because of how realistic the AI makes each individual sound.

“Most people find it entertaining because it [looks like] famous people that are doing funny things when in reality they’re fake,” freshman Brennan Sherman said.

Deepfakes without a doubt have taken the internet by storm as some of the most entertaining forms of content. Currently, these videos mostly stand as harmless clips to make people laugh. However with the deepfake technology rapidly developing, it is headed down a negative path.

Recently, the world has been experiencing viral deepfakes of powerful individuals like Vladimir Putin declaring peace on the Ukraine war or President Zelensky ordering the soldiers of Ukraine to lay down their weapons and surrender.

“Politics is where the consequences are more severe. You can have [someone] like the head of state or president being deepfaked and that can lead to heavy consequences and impact,” social studies teacher Carlos Villa said.

People eventually found out that the videos weren’t the real Putin and Zelesnky, but for a while many fell victim to believing in the videos. They were so realistic to the point where president Zelensky himself had to post a video on his verified account addressing the deepfake.

“It’s scary to think you can make someone important in the world like [politicians] say something that is controversial,” Sherman said. Although deepfakes are doing more harm than good, this doesn’t necessarily mean that deepfakes should be banned. They brought a whole new level of entertainment to social media and banning them removes the opportunity to make more.

“I’m kind of against total banning. I think it’s a matter of introducing tools, like educating how to recognize them,” Villa said.

This doesn’t mean that people should still be mimicking famous individuals, especially serious ones like politicians.

“I personally think that trying to control it is difficult. From the government standpoint, they don’t even know how these things work,” computer science teacher Martha Leveque said.

How would the government ban Deepfakes if they don’t even know how they are supposed to work? Some regulation should be put in such as a way to distinguish deepfakes from normal videos and analyze them before being posted onto YouTube or TikTok.

“I’d love regulation [...] I would prefer that companies themselves figure something out to regulate it,” Leveque said.