As you may have been
reminded recently, the second person to walk on the moon was Edwin Eugene
"Buzz" Aldrin Jr., who accompanied Neil Armstrong in the lunar module
during the Apollo 11 flight in July of 1969.
A common problem faced by the lunar astronauts was what to do with the
rest of your life afterwards, and one thing Aldrin did was to make public
appearances about his astronaut career.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Aldrin showed up at a Beverly Hills hotel expecting to
be interviewed on camera for a Japanese children's television program. Instead, waiting for him was one Bart Sibrel,
a sometime documentary filmmaker who has made a career out of promoting the
idea that NASA's moon landings were all faked in a secret CIA-operated
studio. Sibrel, accompanied by his own
film crew, aggressively tried to get Aldrin to swear on a Bible that he had
landed on the moon, and when Aldrin declined to do that in front of cameras and
told Sibrel to leave him alone, Sibrel called him a "thief, liar, and
coward" and reportedly backed him against a wall and poked him with the
Bible. In response, the 72-year-old
Aldrin punched the 250-pound Sibrel in the jaw, but no charges were filed.
Sibrel has made a career out
of claiming that all the visual evidence (as well as physical evidence in the
form of moon rocks distributed around the world) showing that men have been to
the moon was essentially an elaborate "deepfake." The word was not invented in 1969, but the
concept of lying is as old as humanity. For
reasons of his own, Sibrel thinks (or at least appears to think) that NASA and
the CIA concocted an extremely elaborate lie and backed it up with artificially-generated
visual evidence.
In 1969, there was no such
thing as advanced computer graphics that could take images from different sources
and combine them seamlessly to make it look like, for example, actor Tom Hanks
was in the same room with President John F. Kennedy, as the movie "Forrest
Gump" showed in 1994 in one of the first films that took advantage of
computer-generated imagery (CGI). Well,
the great democratizing force known as IT has now brought the simpler kinds of
digital fakery to the masses. Some
people are worried that simple tricks such as speeding up or slowing down authentic
videos will cause more trouble than the sophisticated deepfakes that even experts
have problems detecting.
A recent Associated Press
article describes how U. S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was made to
appear physically impaired by simply playing back a recording of her at a
slower speed. While some such tricks are
pulled purely for satirical purposes, digital forensics expert Hany Field
worries that unsophisticated voters will be fooled by them nonetheless. He called the doctored Pelosi video, which
got over two million views on Facebook, "a canary in a coal mine,"
and expects the 2020 election year will see many more such crude trick fakes,
which one could call shallowfakes.
According to some studies
quoted in the article, some groups of voters (older ones and
"ultra-conservatives," whatever that means) tend to trust videos more
and will retweet, and otherwise treat as credible, videos that younger and less
conservative people will quickly recognize as having been altered. I have seen this sort of effect myself as I
have watched an otherwise sensible and well-balanced woman of my acquaintance lap
up stuff on Facebook that I consider arrant nonsense, on occasion.
It's possible that such
people hold all Facebook information in a different category in their minds
from things that people they trust tell them in person, and that it's a sort of
entertainment more than a serious search for the real truth. But all this lies in the uncertain realm of
what may influence voters, which includes everything from the weather to the
state of one's health. And as such, we
can only speculate on its effects.
Two possible ways mentioned
by the news article to mitigate any negative effects of shallowfakes are
so-called "downranking" by social media outlets such as Facebook, and
adding fact-checking information to suspicious-looking videos or information such
as labels saying "This video has been altered from its original
state." The problem with this is
that it puts the social-media operators in the role of censor, or at least
editor. And depending on the political
character of the shallowfake and the political leanings of the censor or
editor, someone is sure to cry "Foul!" at such actions, or at least
point out equally egregious shallowfakes on the opposite end of the political
spectrum that haven't been censored, edited, or labeled as such. That is a quagmire that organizations like
Facebook may not care to wade into, and I'm not sure they should.
One thing is for certain: the video-altering genie of cheap and easily
available software is not going back into its bottle. And any thought of government regulation or
censorship moves us in the direction of dictatorships like China, where members
of minority groups such as Uighurs get sent to what amounts to concentration
camps simply for trying to get in touch with other Uighurs on social
media.
So perhaps the answer is a
better-educated electorate. Civics
education in this country is reportedly in terrible shape anyway, as many
history texts seem to concentrate on everything bad our forefathers did (excuse
me, should I say "forepeople"?
No, I shouldn't.). I do recall
one lesson I learned from a high-school history book, which was that after the
famous purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union where whole rafts of bureaucrats
were executed at Stalin's whim, new editions of history books carried photos of
the Great Leader from which certain undesirables had been airbrushed away,
without comment. I was warned in the
1970s against that sort of thing happening, and so today we should warn our
high-schoolers against the danger of both deepfakes and shallowfakes. But after that, it's up to them to judge—and
to vote.
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