A manipulated video that mimics the voice of Vice President Kamala Harrissaying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.
The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.
The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic president nominee, released last week launching her campaign. But the video swaps out the voice-over audio with another voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.
This is, what, how many total times Elon has shared something like this on Twitter where his intention has been (at the very least) dubious?
I find very few reasons to give him the benefit of the doubt here by treating it as some “haha funny meme XD” reaction from him.
Shouldn’t conercerns already be raised pretty high.
It was one of the first anyone thought of. Not sure how they think this is a new concern.
Indeed! I’m also extremely concerned about musk/billionaires in politics. Gee, am I over reacting? /s
Removed by mod
Any way to see the video without making an X account and scrolling Musk’s feed? Two things I’d rather not do.
I’m glad it’s not easy because it shouldn’t be disseminated
Gotta hard disagree with you there, friend… Although I see the merit in that, I think we should be taking examples like this and sharing them around with crystal clear context that:
- This is a troubling blend of real and fake, and it’s easy to not notice which parts are which
- This is a new category of propaganda that we aren’t ready for
- Even though this one is pretty easy to clock as fake satire, it’s not hard to imagine nudging a few degrees away from tongue-in-cheek and toward deliberately deceitful, and holy shit is that going to be scary
Like I know lots of people who don’t know that this sort of thing is even remotely possible, and would have a hard time understanding how to contextualize it, even if they sense something fishy about it. They need to see and hear these deepfake-adjacent materials first hand with context to innoculate against the truly deceptive stuff that they’ll be exposed to.
Even though this one is pretty easy to clock as fake satire
By 30s in to the 1m52s video, when she calls Biden a deep state puppet, is where it’ll be obvious to (I hope) 99% of the population. Prob not quite that high though. But yeah. Wanna emphasize it’s not a deepfake of her supposedly spicy stuff…
It’s what an idiot thinks is cunning satire.
It’s dangerous, of course, but don’t want folks to get the wrong message. We might be at an early stage of Musk testing what he can get away with w/r/t political deepfakes - maybe the next one will be dicier. Or maybe not, he can be awful without faking a thing.
Yeah… I think part of the trouble though is that even if people recognize that calling Biden “a deep state puppet” is not plausible, many people don’t know that it’s possible to realistically synthesize a voice like that, so where do they end up?
“Well they probably took some other quote she said out of context, she must have been joking when she said that,” or “They must have cut different clips together” or something like that.
So even people who don’t fully fall for it can still be deceived in a more subtle way. Or as another respondent mentions, over time, you remember her voice saying something dubious, but don’t quite remember where or what. A subtle nudge that can be just as dangerous as buying it at face value.
many people don’t know that it’s possible to realistically synthesize a voice like that
Indeed, 99% was fabulously wishful of me.
subtle nudge
Devious and insidious. Great point.
I really do see your point but like deplatforming my instinct is “out of sight out of mind.”
I see your point, too! I think to the degree that the story is about Elon showing us who he is, it makes sense to just give the dumpster fire less oxygen to burn… But to the degree that it’s about AI eroding our ability to understand truth, I think we need as much exposure as possible to things like this while we can recognize them.
I think a reasonable person could land in either place in this instance.
It also feels like there’s something subliminal about it. Like you’re hearing her voice saying she’s a deep state puppet then cut to her actually making a mistake in a speech (but it’s using old school editing techniques there too) and then back to the deepfake voice back to the actual video of her.
Sure when you see it you know which is her and which is the deepfake. But later if you see some of those actual clips again, you might recall seeing it somewhere before and then vaguely recall some of the things the deepfake voice said along with it.
It’s very insidious really. Memories are a weird thing and I don’t know if it’s been studied what kind of effect this sort of thing could have on people. So I don’t know. But it seems plausible that you could create false memories of someone saying something they didn’t say by intercutting things they did say with a deep fake of things they didn’t say.
Here’s a direct link to the tweet, but I’m not sure if you can watch the video without an account anymore: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1816974609637417112?s=46&t=EUtgwMByNj4sQbVP9INV-Q
Oh, I actually was able to see it without an account-- Thank you for finding/sharing the link!
It’s uh… Pretty much exactly what it sounded like from the article. It’s pretty clear to me that it’s satire and fake, but I’m not sure that it would be to, say, some of my family members.
It’s worse than I thought from the article. Outrageously and overtly racist.
Flood twitter with JD Vance couch fucking AI content and see how fast Musk makes them disappear.
Or real pictures of Trump’s ear
“My name is JD Vance and I approve this loveseat.”
JD Vance is Sofa King
This is the way
Hey guys, it’s me JD, JD Vance here to react to the latest IKEA commercial. I thought the last one was kind of lame, it was really unexciting to be honest. The couches were barely featured. It was mostly bathroom footage, which is totally boring. But maybe they’ve turned it around. I mean, I doubt it, but let’s see. Let’s hit play.
Oh shit, is that a love seat… uuugghhhharrahhh
Ah, so he’s also into the “petite” category!
What is this 2018? That ship has already sailed.
That is election fraud and Elon should be in jail.
How isn’t this… disparagement? Or defamation or whatever (I’m not a lawyer).
Oh easy, cuz he’s filthy rich.
Whoever created it is more likely to be able to be successfully prosecuted (assuming they could be identified) than the person or people spreading it.
The person who uploaded it to Twitter labeled it as parody. Musk then retweeted it without that parody marker.
You could argue it isn’t parody, but that is tricker.
An old well developed technology needs to be adopted and the public needs to be educated on its use. AI cannot defeat cryptographic signatures which could be used to verify the authorship and the integrity of any digital content. I would support laws that help facilitate mass adoption of this technology. PGP is 33 years old.
It still bugs me how little general public knows about this. Even shows don’t have a clue, or are scared to explain this.
Like this is a solved problem, please please please just use the solution that has been here for the entire time.
The “general public” has very little knowledge about most of what happens in society.
They don’t understand where everything that keeps them alive comes from, let alone how the internet or deerpfakes or so-called “AI” works.
Probably not pgp as it’s been thoroughly broken… but I get what you’re saying
Pgp is an application. Algorithms get broken, not applications.
Eh. Old small RSA keys can be broken and PGP is quirky enough to not be good for automatic scripted validation. But 4096 bit RSA or ECC or newer PQ algorithms still works fine and there’s newer schemes for signatures that are solid
Musk is just jealous that his shitty gronk can’t do it.
Why is there no link to the video? Did he even post that? I’m not even seing it on his Twitter.
Thanks. It doesn’t show up on his profile. And the articles don’t have a link to it. That’s why I couldn’t.
Big Brainlon messes up profiles if not logged in. Super whack out-of-order random Tweets.
Login to dumpsterfire, scroll a bit, there’s the amazing witty satire:
(Am assuming there’s no A/B test stuff going on)
Shouldn’t that guy be trying to save at least one of his companies from the ever increasing explosions of shit and bad management that “somehow” seem to plague them?
How could he do that? He is the bad management.
I’m sure we could think of some ways for him to do that.
By fucking off to Mars and dying there?
That’s high on the list!
Surely this is illegal, right? Right??
padme.gif
It might be… But if it wasn’t, someone shouldn’t make a video of Trump talking about that he already won and that no one needs to vote… Please don’t do this! It would be very wrong if someone did this! His supporters might be filled and stay home…
No one do this!
I… hmmmm… I feel like there’s a secret message here waiting to be decoded.
In Minnesota it is illegal up to 90 days before the election.
I don’t know all the state laws, but there are more.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/artificial-intelligence-deepfakes-2024-election-states-rcna129525
That’s for sexual acts. I’m still reading it though, but where does elections come into play?
Edit: found it. Section 2. Sorry.
So if Musk doesn’t delete his post before (let’s see) August 7, he is still arguably disseminating it and violating the law, huh?
Just read through the part about punishment, and it’d be 90 days in jail and a $1000 fine. Even I could afford that. 🙄
It’s the jail time that’s important. I’d guess Musk would spend a billion dollars to not have to go to jail for 90 days.
Also we’re 100 days out. If Elon did this again within 90 days, and he sent the tweet from Texas or something. Would Minnesota or another state law be able to hold him accountable? Since of course the tweet would be seen across the country. I wonder what would happen. The senate is working on a federal law, but I doubt the house will be very cooperative before the election.
I would hope this falls under libel laws and makes Musk culpable for a lawsuit and/or gag order.
Raining concerns about
AIElon Mollusk.raising concerns about AI in politics
Anyone else more concerned about narcissistic bigoted billionaires in politics? 🙋♂️
Why not both?
Definitely both – although still probably better to be more concerned about the billionaires
