Tag: deep fakes

TAKE IT DOWN Act Advances in House Despite Major Censorship Concerns

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce has passed the TAKE IT DOWN (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks) Act in a 49 to 1, bipartisan vote, and the legislation is now headed for the House of Representatives.

If the bill clears that hurdle as well, it will be up to President Trump to sign it into law.

Backed, among others, by First Lady Melania Trump, TAKE IT DOWN was introduced as a way to stop the spread of real, and AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). If, as it seems likely, TAKE IT DOWN becomes law, it will force platforms to remove flagged content within 48 hours.

But the bill’s critics continue to warn that the text lacks proper safeguards and other requirements that would prevent it from being misused, or abused as a tool of censorship, instead of narrowly serving its declarative purpose.

These concerns are not addressed in a press release the Committee on Energy and Commerce issued after adopting the proposal, as it focused instead on the benefits the legislation would provide to victims of dissemination of explicit imagery, with an emphasis on that which is AI-generated, i.e., on deepfakes.

However, campaigners, among them the Center for Democracy and Technology and the EFF, believe that the bill’s actual wording does not live up to its good intent, specifically around the takedown requirement which “lends itself to abuse.”

While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be tasked with issuing penalties for non-compliance, under TAKE IT DOWN, there are no consequences for those making false reports, which could lead to legitimate content quickly disappearing from the internet.

The bill doesn’t lay out how those affected might appeal once their content is falsely flagged and removed, while platforms are under no threat of penalty for removing constitutionally protected speech.

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The Take It Down Act: A Censorship Weapon Disguised As Protection

President Trump has thrown his support behind the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to combat the spread of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes. The legislation has gained momentum, particularly with First Lady Melania Trump backing the effort, and Trump himself endorsing it during his March 4 address to Congress.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

“The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act…. Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

While this comment was likely tongue-in-cheek, it highlights an important question: how will this law be enforced, and who will benefit the most from it?

A Necessary Law with Potential Pitfalls

The rise of AI-generated explicit content and the increasing problem of revenge porn are serious concerns. Victims of NCII have long struggled to get harmful content removed, often facing bureaucratic roadblocks while the damage continues to spread. The Take It Down Act aims to give individuals more power to protect themselves online.

However, as with many internet regulations, the challenge is in the details. Laws designed to curb harmful content often run the risk of being too broad, potentially leading to overreach. Critics warn that, without clear safeguards, the legislation could be used beyond its intended purpose.

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Trump Jr. Team Slams AI-Generated Fake Video as ‘100% False’

A sophisticated AI-fabricated video deceptively portraying Donald Trump Jr. advocating for U.S. arms support to Russia instead of Ukraine has ignited controversy across social media platforms. Multiple confirmations from Trump Jr.’s team have definitively established that the video and accompanying audio were entirely AI-generated. Which prominent social media accounts shared the fake content?

Anatomy of a Digital Deception

A viral video purportedly showing Donald Trump Jr. advocating for the United States to send weapons to Russia instead of Ukraine has been confirmed as entirely fake by multiple sources. The sophisticated AI-generated content was widely shared across social media platforms, including accounts with large followings on X.

The falsified clip depicted Trump Jr. making controversial statements about Ukraine, suggesting Russia would be a better ally due to its substantial resources and size. In the fabricated audio, a voice mimicking Trump Jr. could be heard saying, “I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind picking Ukraine as an ally when Russia is the other option” and “Honestly, the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia.”

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Elon Musk’s X Sues California Over Deepfake Law Seen as Threat to Free Speech

Elon Musk’s X has initiated legal action against the state of California, seeking to prevent the enforcement of a new statute mandating that major online platforms either remove or label deepfake election-related content, as a violation of the First Amendment, particularly for its impact on memes and satire.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The legal challenge was presented in a federal court earlier this week, focusing on legislation designed to curb the influence of artificially altered videos, images, and sounds, collectively known as deepfakes. The legislation is poised to become effective on January 1.

The law in question, Assembly Bill 2655, was signed as part of California’s efforts to safeguard the integrity of the upcoming 2024 US presidential election from the risks posed by technological manipulation. Governor Gavin Newsom, having clashed with Musk following Musk’s sharing of a parody video of Vice President Kamala Harris, aims to mitigate these alleged risks.

The legislation has sparked concerns among tech giants and free speech supporters, who understand that it suppresses user engagement and stifles free discourse and satire under the guise of curbing misinformation.

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The Pentagon Wants to Use AI to Create Deepfake Internet Users

The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.

The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”

In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”

The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.

Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.” Such imagery is generated using a variety of machine learning techniques, generally using software that has been “trained” to recognize and recreate human features by analyzing a massive database of faces and bodies. This year’s SOCOM wish list specifies an interest in software similar to StyleGAN, a tool released by Nvidia in 2019 that powered the globally popular website “This Person Does Not Exist.” Within a year of StyleGAN’s launch, Facebook said it had taken down a network of accounts that used the technology to create false profile pictures. Since then, academic and private sector researchers have been engaged in a race between new ways to create undetectable deepfakes, and new ways to detect them. Many government services now require so-called liveness detection to thwart deepfaked identity photos, asking human applicants to upload a selfie video to demonstrate they are a real person — an obstacle that SOCOM may be interested in thwarting.

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White House Defends Labeling Critical Biden Videos as “Deepfakes”

The world (and the US with it, with the current US administration pretty much leading the way) has for the last few years witnessed what has obviously been a concerted effort to make “AI-powered deepfakes” a thing.

Specifically – a thing that can negatively shape up an election, or even break a democracy.

Anyone, especially apolitical people but those with even a cursory knowledge of the “deepfakes” tech and how long it’s been around in all sorts of media, might have been confused as to why this rhetoric is happening, and why now?

Well – now – months before a US presidential election, we’re starting to get answers.

President Joe Biden is trying to remain in office – and now the White House is giving the world an indication of why the “deepfakes” scaremongering was launched in the first place (and then dutiful picked up by certain – or let’s say, most – corporate media.)

“Confused and disoriented” is a (believe it or not) nicer way to describe the situation with President Biden and his public appearances; the latest, and at this time, the most important, concerns his performance during debates last week.

Instead of trying to prop their candidate up (figuratively and literally) in some credible way, the current White House decided to label the media showing clips of Biden “malfunctioning” as, in addition to being “disinformation, misinformation” – also “cheap fakes.”

But what in the world is that? Is it a video that somebody just happens to dislike, so it’s branded in a way deceptively invoking the dreaded “deepfakes”?

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The Spread of Artificial Intelligence. The Emergence of “Deep Fakes”, Masterful Distortions. “Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”

George Orwell was spot on when he wrote that “who controls the past controls the future.” The remarkable advances of Artificial Intelligence technology appear to bear him out. But they confirm also the correctness of the rest of his prescient remark, which is cited less often, that “who controls the present controls the past.” That also seems confirmed, as we shall see presently.

Artificial intelligence has rightfully become the subject of great controversy, even though it is still early to fully assess its impact. Yet with each passing day the problematic, and some would even say nefarious, aspects of its uses are becoming increasingly evident.

One of the chief concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence is its pretension to supersede and consign to a state of permanent subservience its human counterpart. Another is the danger it poses to workmen. Their jobs will become largely obsolete and incomes will diminish or disappear once employers discover that the operations human workers were performing for a salary can be done at minimum or no expense by the entity we are becoming accustomed to call Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

Clearly, the uncontrolled spread of AI is taking humanity to uncharted waters.

A bizarre illustration is the recent candidacy of an AI entity for mayor of Cheyenne in the US state of Wyoming. Good luck to the good and supposedly conservative people of Cheyenne if they do not have a qualified human candidate amongst them to vote for.

This is just one of the levels where common sense should dictate extreme caution before uncritically engaging some of the potential AI applications. There is however another and more ominous application that is proliferating on the internet. Unlike the previous example, it is not in the least entertaining but should cause alarm and intense unease.

That is the emergence of “deep fakes,” masterful distortions of reality so convincingly executed that even the most advanced forensic tools, let alone the unaided human faculties, would find it nearly impossible to detect the deception.

Within the genus of what has come to be known as deep fakes a specific and sinister class has emerged that is saturating the internet. It does not aim to inflict the usual annoyances such as altering an individual’s appearance, making him do or say things that in real life he never would, or depicting him credibly in a compromising situation for the purpose of discreditation. Instead of generating banal personal fakes, it does something that causes incomparably more harm. It deliberately falsifies the historical record by erasing the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. It misleads the uninformed and the gullible by manufacturing events that theoretically could have, but never did happen.

The phony “October 1963” CBS news report about the supposed outbreak of the German civil war is a case in point. Everything about it is impressively realistic but it is false history, a fabrication cut from whole cloth. The underlying message of the “news broadcast” read by legendary CBS announcer Walter Cronkite is that Germany was not defeated in World War II but achieved its major war aims, including control of Europe, substantial conquests in the East, and the restoration of its African colonies. According to this false scenario in World War II it is Russia that was defeated and compelled to withdraw to the east, perhaps to the other side of the Urals since Moscow is mentioned as a district under German rule. After Hitler’s death, presumably of natural causes, a power struggle ensues amongst his lieutenants. The “victorious” Germany is portrayed as a robust nuclear power that even the United States fears to antagonise.

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