Cheap Fakes beat Deep Fakes

Deepfakes are risky for information warfare, but exciting new capabilities for security

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I’ve always been sceptical of deepfakes. What are they good for? I’ve never understood the excitement over the perceived utility of deep fakes for disinformation in information warfare. Information warfare does not need deepfakes, cheapfakes are more than enough. Finally, someone has found a use for deepfakes as offensive cyber tools, so let’s deep dive deep fakes!

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The Deepfake Hype Train: Disinformation

Usually the threat of deepfakes is presented as an information warfare challenge, one that will make disinformation much harder to combat. This assessment is on display everywhere. Here is one recent example: Congress grapples with how to regulate deepfakes.

The threat of deepfakes for information operations is minimal. Generally speaking people do not engage in rhetoric to change their own ideas, but to build coalitions with other people. When presenting data to support their arguments they are looking only for examples that appear to discredit counter arguments, or that seem to support their own. There is no reason why deepfakes would be more effective at this than existing cheapfake techniques, such as manipulation of audiovisual media, miscontextualized and decontextualized audiovisual media, etc.

Deepfakes are a threat to information warfare because they can be easily exposed as false, a lie. One of the fundamental rules of information warfare is that you never lie (except when necessary.) Deepfakes are detectable as artificial content, which reveals the lie. This discredits the source of the information and the rest of their argument. For an information warfare campaign, using deepfakes is a high risk proposition.

Deepfake Scepticism