Human beings can doctor images such as photographs, but its laborious and difficult. And faking voices and video is beyond our capability. But soon, thanks to machine learning, it will probably be possible to easily and quickly create realistic forgeries of someones face and make it seem as if they are speaking in their own voice. Already, lip-synching technology can literally put words in a persons mouth. This is just the tip of the iceberg -- soon, 12-year-olds in their bedrooms will be able to create photorealistic, perfect-sounding fakes of politicians, business leaders, relatives and friends saying anything imaginable.
This lends itself to some pretty obvious abuses. Political hoaxes -- so-called fake news -- will spread like wildfire. The hoaxes will be discovered in short order -- no digital technology is so good that other digital technology cant detect the phony -- but not before it puts poisonous ideas into the minds of people primed to believe them. Imagine perfect-looking fake video of presidential candidates spouting racial slurs, or admitting to criminal acts.
But thats just the beginning. Imagine the potential for stock manipulation. Suppose someone releases a sham video of Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk admitting in private that Teslas cars are unsafe. The video would be passed around the internet, and Tesla stock would crash. The stock would recover a short while later, once the forgery was revealed -- but not before the manipulators had made their profits by short-selling Tesla shares.
Those who view these extreme scenarios as alarmist will rightfully point out that no fake will ever be undetectable. The same machine learning technology that creates forgeries will be used to detect them. But that doesnt mean were safe from the brave new world of ubiquitous fakes. Once forgeries get so good that humans cant detect them, our trust in the veracity of our eyes and ears will forever vanish. Instead of trusting our own perceptions, we will be forced to place our trust in the algorithms used for fraud detection and verification. We evolved to trust our senses; switching to trust in machine intelligence instead will be a big jump for most people.
