In its effort to interfere in future U.S. elections, Russia may deploy extremely realistic fake videos that appear to show candidates or other important figures engaged in scandalous, shocking, or provocative behavior, two senators warned Monday.
“When we move into deep-fake technology, the ramifications that has not only to move elections, but to move markets and whole societies in a real-time basis” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said during an Atlantic Council event. “That’s really frightening.”
Those comments speak to the growing concern, among policy makers, that wholesale digital fakery could lend a new level of meaning to the term “fake news.” The technology could be used to forge apparently real videos of public figures, opening the next theater of cyber-warfare on a budget affordable to nearly anyone.
It’s a particular concern of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “Imagine producing a video that has me or Senator Warner saying something we never said on the eve of an election,” the Florida Republican said during the Atlantic Council event. “By the time I’ve proved that video is fake, even though it looks real, that’s too late. That’s already happening; people are doing it for fun with off-the-shelf technology. Imagine it in the hands of a nation-state.”
The face-swap software first gained prominence in hands of an anonymous amateur machine-learning programmer on Reddit.
“With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network,” the app creator told Vice. “After that if I feed the network someone else’s face, the network will think it’s just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face.”
Rubio addressed this topic in the context of a larger discussion of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. “One thing the Russians have done in other countries in the past is they’ve put out incomplete information, altered information, and/or fake information,” Rubio said, before outlining his deep-fake scenario.
That technology, if their predictions bear out, would exacerbate an already-fraught political environment, at first preying on people’s credulity and then eventually making it impossible for anyone to believe their own eyes.
The senators aired those concerns hours after President Trump declined to endorse the U.S. intelligence assessments that Russian officials are responsible for the 2016 cyberattacks against the Democratic party.
“My people came to me . . . they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump said Monday. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people.”
