Your weekly update on how AI is changing our lives. Our experts keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on military deepfakes. Don't forget to explore our Archive and Share & Subscribe with your friends!
People have been saying “the first casualty of war is truth” for a very long time, although ironically enough nobody can quite agree on who said it first. It’s widely credited to Senator Hiram Johnson during WW1, but a substantial group of people insist it originally comes from the Greek playwright Aeschylus, back in the 5th century BC. Who’s right? We don’t know, but one thing’s for sure; neither Senator Johnson nor Aeschylus would be much use at spotting a deepfake.
For more modern assessments of how truth becomes warped by war, we turn to Ireland’s University College Cork, where researchers have just published a fascinating study examining tweets from the first half of 2022 that matched the search terms “deepfake Zelenskyy”, “deepfake Putin” or “deepfake Ukraine”. This period saw the first known use of AI-generated video propaganda in a global conflict, and the UCC paper is the first to study the impact of this disinformation. The most eye-catching revelation? The huge uptick in people dismissing legitimate footage as fake, with video incorrectly described as “deepfake” almost six times as often as actual deepfakes were called out.
This is partly because there simply weren’t many deepfakes in circulation at that time. Even now, the technology is not sufficiently advanced to quickly generate convincing footage, but as we are once again seeing in the Israel-Hamas conflict, the mere existence of deepfakes as a concept makes discrediting any video footage a trivial task. Another returning theme has been the extensive use of video game footage as propaganda, with the first disinformation shots in both conflicts generated not by AI, but aging military combat simulators and repurposed footage of old conflicts.
In the first days of the Ukraine invasion, rumors of the “Ghost of Kyiv” - a Ukrainian fighter pilot who downed six Russian planes in the first 24 hours - went viral on social media, thanks largely to video footage of aerial dogfights lifted from the 15-year-old PC game Digital Combat Simulator. That footage was retweeted by the Ukrainian Department of Defence, and unquestionably helped to galvanize the Ukrainian forces in the early days of the resistance. Two months later, the Ukrainian Air Force admitted the Ghost was a phantom, while cheekily warning that in future, people should take care not to “neglect the basic rules of information hygiene!” Of course, this is excellent advice, and it’s only going to become more relevant as deepfake technology improves: fortunately, we have you covered with this superb explainer on disinformation in all its many forms!
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