DEEPFAKES—DIGITAL CREATIONS in which people appear to be saying and doing things they never did or said—have been around for a while now, mostly as jokey, obviously satirical clips on the internet. In the past decade, the technology has been widely used in entertainment. Carrie Fisher was faked into Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. A hologram of Tupac Shakur headlined the 2012 Coachella festival, one of Whitney Houston is about to play Vegas, etc. But this year, in Roadrunner, a documentary about the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, a line was crossed.
On the surface, what Roadrunner’s director Morgan Neville did seems like no big deal. He hired a tech company to use digital recordings of Bourdain’s voice to generate audio clips of Bourdain saying things that he wrote but never said aloud. In an age when we’ve become used to documentaries, and even straight news stories, using reenactments of events that weren’t caught on camera, this may seem pretty harmless. However, when responsible documentarians and journalists use reenact-ments, they clearly identify them as such. Neville—an Oscar, Emmy, and Directors Guild Award winner whose films include 20 Feet from Stardom and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?—did no such thing. In response to a New Yorker reporter’s questions, he admitted using the deepfake technique, but at the time of this writing he still refuses to identify all of the faked passages in his movie.
The danger posed by deepfakes should be obvious and is already here. Rana Ayyub is a female investigative journalist in In-dia famous for exposing government corruption and human rights abuses. Three years ago, still-unidentified political enemies posted to WhatsApp a fake porn clip with Ayyub’s face on the body of the woman in the video. Instantly, the video was everywhere on social media networks. Death threats aimed at Ayyub ensued. Her home address was publicized, and she went into hiding for months.
It may seem like a big leap from a documentarian’s faked voiceover to the character assassination (and worse) of a public figure, but that’s only if you are entirely naïve about the course the tech industry has taken in the past 25 years. That is a story of digital technology consistently outrunning our capacity to manage it and leaving chaos and disaster in its wake. When Mark Zuckerberg and his friends were creating Facebook in a Harvard dorm room, they weren’t thinking about live- streaming rape and mass murder, but that’s what the platform they created ended up with. Anonymity on Twitter helped fuel democratic uprisings around the Middle East, but it also shielded the people who attacked Rana Ayyub.
We can’t uninvent deepfake technology, but our federal government has to impose tight regulation on its proliferation—before our post-truth world goes post-reality.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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