You should know what deepfake means because

• SAT vocab, and
• this week’s news cycle has been centered squarely on the technology—and just how out of hand it can get.

A deepfake is an artificial intelligence-generated video that depicts someone saying or doing things that person never actually said or did.

Exhibit A: Zuck

• This week, the Facebook CEO got deepfaked in a video showing his delivering a sermon, saying he was “one man with total control of billions of people’s stolen data”.
• Things got awkward. FB’s tech wizards could have easily made the video go away, but ultimately kept the video on its platform because Facebook (along with the rest of the big social outlets) look at deepfakes as a nose goes situation, saying they shouldn’t be the arbiter of what’s true. So they tag deepfakes and feed them to the misinformation algorithms, burying them in feeds so fewer people see them.

Nose goes is a method most commonly used when deciding which of several persons is assigned an unwanted task.

• No one really knows who should handle deepfake situations: Some say the FBI, some say the Dept. of Homeland Security, and some say the media…

Exhibit B: Congress

• Yesterday, Congress held its first hearing on the deepfake threat both inside and outside the beltway. Deepfakes are suggested to be used to obstruct a company’s IPO by, for example, showing an exec committing a (faked) crime. The handful of days it takes to identify a deepfake leaves plenty of time for irreversible damage to a stock price.
• Looking ahead… according to House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, the 2020 election is about to be a “nightmarish” cycle for deepfakes, with online mischief makers testing our understanding of reality and campaigns’ responses. Reality check: Axios reached 10 separate 2020 campaigns, and not one could point to any “protective steps” taken against deepfakes.

Content source: kgrant. (2019) "Word of the Week: Deepfake". Morning Brew. Available from: https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/word-of-the-week-deepfake/ [Accessed 22 June 2019]