Last Week's Biden Deepfake: A Few Thoughts

I remember how when "deepfakes" started getting press back in 2018 the emphasis--quite predictably given the inability of anything to compete with prurience or identity politics, and still more the combination of both, for the attention of the media elite--was overwhelmingly on the pornographic possibilities of the technology.

I do not say that the misuse and abuse of the technology was or is unimportant. But it seemed to me that there was less attention than there ought to have been to other uses, with this past week providing an excellent example. It seems that a deepfake of President Biden announcing a reinstitution of the draft for the sake of military confrontation with Russia and China "went viral."

If you have checked out the video for yourself you will have probably noticed that it was laughably crude even to the eyes of a non-expert--about as convincing as the "moving mouth" bits on Conan O'Brien.

But we are told that a good many people thought it was genuine.

One may take this as demonstrative of the public's unsophistication in such matters. (Certainly this is what elitist censorship-lovers prefer to emphasize.) However, this does not seem to me the only factor in their reaction. There is, too, the way they are experiencing the bigger world situation. Even those who prefer to attend as little as possible to the international scene have been less able to ignore it than before, and for anyone too young to remember when The Day After aired the international situation in 2023 may simply have no precedent within living memory. A return to the draft in America may remain a remote prospect for the moment, but all the same, they are conscious of the prospect of war, of old-fashioned, great power, in a way they have not been in generations, and watching the situation only escalate, and widen, as the prices they experience in the grocery store are chalked up to that conflict, they anticipate . . . something, something bad they will feel in their very own lives very soon. What all this means regarding their opinion about the war--whether they are supportive of it, or not supportive of it, or shifting from one attitude to the other--is less clear from this reaction, but it does seem worth remembering that people are less likely to be enthusiastic about an armed conflict when they think of it as something that will touch them personally, and take from them personally, rather than be invisible in their lives as the fighting is carried on solely by people they do not know in a place they cannot find on the map as they go about their daily lives merrily oblivious.