pwbet gaming A.I. Is Coming for the Past, Too
We don’t have to imagine a world where deepfakes can so believably imitate the voices of politicians that they can be used to gin up scandals that could sway elections. It’s already here. Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events.
While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.
History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones. While new content may be secured through built-in systems, there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.
And this will create a treasure trove of opportunities for backstopping false claims with generated documents, from photos placing historical figures in compromising situations, to altering individual stories in historical newspapers, to changing names on deeds of title. While all of these techniques have been used before, countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.
This forecast is based on history. There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed. Slovenia, on becoming an independent country in 1992, erased over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
False documents are a key part of many efforts to rewrite the historical record. The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921 as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding covenant.
In 1924 the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election. The letter’s origin has never been proved, but its authenticity was questioned at the time, and an official investigation in the 1990s concluded that it was most likely the work of White Russians — a conservative political faction led at the time by Russian émigrés opposed to the Communist government.
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