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The new election frontier: #Deepfakes are coming and often target women – SPONSOR: Datametrex AI Limited $DM.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 12:45 PM on Monday, March 9th, 2020

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The new election frontier: Deepfakes are coming and often target women

By C.J. Moore

  • Deepfake technology has been called a powerful feat in artificial intelligence and machine learning at its best, and unsettling — even sinister — at its worst
  • “Deepfakes could be used to influence elections or incite civil unrest, or as a weapon of psychological warfare,” per the report
  • Also notes that much of deepfake content online “is pornographic, and deepfake pornography disproportionately victimizes women.”

Deepfakes are media — usually videos, audio recordings or photographs — that have been doctored through artificial intelligence (AI) software to fabricate a person’s facial or body movements. They can easily spread by sharing over social media platforms and other websites. 

One well-known example is a video that circulated in August 2019, in which actor Bill Hader does an impersonation of Tom Cruise. The video is edited so Hader’s face morphs into a realistic image of Cruise, giving the impression that it’s the latter talking.

Beyond that, deepfake circulation could be damaging in 2020 and future election cycles. Along with celebrities, government leaders are the most common subjects of deepfakes, according to a February Science and Tech Spotlight from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“Deepfakes could be used to influence elections or incite civil unrest, or as a weapon of psychological warfare,” per the report. It also notes that much of deepfake content online “is pornographic, and deepfake pornography disproportionately victimizes women.”

In 2018, Reddit shut down r/deepfakes, a forum that distributed videos of celebrities whose faces had been superimposed on actors in real pornography. The computer-generated fake pornography was banned because it was “involuntary,” or created without consent. 

Much of the same technology used to make those videos could be used to exploit women running for office, according to a GAO official.

“We can’t speak to intent, but the result is definitely that the majority of these do target women,” said Karen Howard, a director on GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment and Analytics (STAA) team.

Read More: https://www.michiganadvance.com/2020/03/09/the-new-election-frontier-deepfakes-are-coming-and-often-target-women/

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