Deep Fakes Technology Research Paper Example

Have you ever been deep faked? Modern technology has allowed people to falsify videos and images that can be potentially harmful to you and your family. With the exponential growth, technology seems to be showing it has led to the growth of this technology as well, we can see it with the general population using apps for it on their phones. We see this becoming an issue with politics and it even has its own name and they call it political warfare. The United States see the problems with this technology because the United States National Security is working with cybersecurity experts and are creating tools to detect deep-faked videos or images. Deep fakes were created for entertainment purposes, but some people use them to falsify information that can destroy reputations. The use of this technology has been used to persuade people into believing false information because it is difficult to distinguish the real video or picture from the deep-faked versions. There will be an increase of ethical and legal considerations to try and regulate the use of deep fakes because the use of this technology is growing in a negative way and there needs to be a change for that.

The United States National Security has had help from the congressional research department to conduct research on how threatening deep fakes are to our national security. This is largely due to the rapid advancements of technology and the unpredictability that comes with it. Deep fakes follow this trend and many fear that it is too accessible to the public and can be misused easily. The United States government shares these fears with the general public because it is currently being used to push false information and to push false political agendas. To combat the misuse of deep fakes the United States National Security department is currently developing multiple software and detection tools to help combat the misuses of deep fakes, this is with the help of the information they gathered from their research. The development of this new software and detection tools do not currently have any success percentages because most of them are in early development and it is too soon to see success rates on them. According to the article “Deep Fakes and National Security. Congressional Research Service.”, it states that “adversaries or politically motivated individuals could release falsified videos of elected officials or other public figures making incendiary comments or behaving inappropriately” (Harris, 2021), this statement informs the reader that not even public figures are safe and there needs to be some control to this technology. The article also states that deep fakes are detectable to the naked eye only to professionals because they know what to look for in the videos or images that have been deep faked. To an untrained person, the article states that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a deep faked image and a non-deep faked image. The United States National Security department has set a goal for this issue and it is to protect people's identities from people who misuse deep fakes. 

Deep fakes are said to have caused political warfare in our current day. In our current day, the digital age there needs to be a change in how politics are being shown to the general public. Modern deep fake technology is now incorporating different forms of technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and many different digital tools that make it almost impossible to detect. The article “Political warfare in the digital age: cyber subversion, information operations, and ‘deep fakes’”, states that “This is highly damaging for the political legitimacy of democracies, which depend upon voters being able to trust in electoral processes and outcomes free from malign influence perceived or otherwise” (Paterson, 2020), this statement has large amounts of truths to it because deep fakes are creating an untrusting society that is toxic to democracy. The author Thomas Paterson makes several interesting points on how deep fakes are affecting democracy and the major point is that fewer and fewer people are willing to protest or express their feelings publicly because they fear that they will be deep faked and have their reputation ruined because of how they feel. Political warfare is on the rise and it has even become a global issue because of the tension the United States has with other countries like China and Russia. There are rumors and some have been proven to be a fact that both these countries China and Russia have used deep fakes to try to manipulate votes to a certain candidate for their benefits. This has caused major confusion to Americans because many say they cannot trust the internet or the news because they are being controlled by foreign countries. Thomas Paterson states that “The continued failure of governments to understand this has undermined their ability to combat this emerging threat” (Paterson, 2020), the United States government has been late to combat deep fakes because the misuse of this technology was never anticipated by the United States government so it has become a challenge for them to combat it. 

Due to the increasing amount of deep fakes and the accessibility of the technology rises the questions to what type of regulations and laws are being put in place to help combat this issue. Experts in this field have set deep fakes into four major categories which include political campaign deep fakes, deep fake pornographic material, deep fakes only for commercial usages, and creative deep fakes. The experts have made statements that deep fakes have raised many ethical questions which makes the tasks of creating rules and regulations a very difficult task. Each of these four categories carries different legal and ethical considerations which makes the job of assigning rules and regulations a tough task. To begin with deep fake pornography it becomes difficult when they have to identify the person being deep faked and it usually involves two or more people. The second task is to try to identify who created this deep fake to hold them accountable for their actions and this is the most difficult task because tracking them can almost be impossible. In the article “Regulating deep fakes: legal and ethical considerations” Meskys states that “The danger of deep fakes is that technology enables the creation of an alternative reality where celebrities and public leaders say and do things they never did, thus deceiving an unaware public. This makes a saying like ‘seeing is believing’ no longer valid” (Meskys, 2020). The author makes these statements because the bad usage of this technology has outweighed the good use of the technology so people have abused the trust of the saying seeing is believing. The abuse of the trust of people has created an untrusting society that is not only harmful to democracy, but also to humanity. As Vaccari stated in the article “Deep fakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News” he states that “Most people may be poorly equipped to discern when they are being deceived by deep fakes. Rossler found that people correctly identify fakes in only about 50% of cases statistically as good as random guessing”, he makes this statement because it is very easy to deceive the public through the use of this technology and it plays a role in the growth of this untrusting culture. This creates the need for the general public to start to learn how to do their own research and learn to decipher what is false or not, the amount of false information on the internet can cause an increase in the cost of getting accurate information because it will take you a long time to find trussing information on the internet. These are the reasons why we need rules and regulations for the usage of deep fakes. 

For all these reasons deep fakes are a harmful tool of technology in today’s society. There needs to be faster development of detection tools to combat the misuse of deep fakes because to the untrained eye it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate picture or video to a deep faked picture or video. Deep fakes have gotten to a point where it has caused a problem to our national security because other countries have used this technology to cause confusion during our national elections, this has also caused political warfare. Due to the different types of deep fakes, it has become a difficult job of detecting who did the deep fake and identifying who the person being deep faked is. Furthermore, it has also become a problem on how deep fakes will be regulated because each use of deep fakes have different reasons behind it, and coming up with rules and regulation will be a difficult job to accomplish. The United States government will need to become well versed in the use of deep fakes to correctly create rules and regulations, there needs to be a form of punishment included with it as well. Overall, the positives of the use of deep fakes have been overwritten by the negatives of deep fakes and only the development of detection tools will save the use of this technology because it is currently being used to create harmful videos or creating false information.