How to fake it till you make it

Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast.

For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have.

Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election was ever likely to be entirely fair and free. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that democracy is like a tram: you take it until it gets you to your destination – the destination, presumably, being such a time as elections become unnecessary. Never-theless the country did go through the election process this week. And despite a surprisingly knife-edge result, the most interesting thing was actually what happened a few days before the election, when a sex tape was released featuring one of the candidates – Muharrem Ince. The candidate immediately denounced the tape as a ‘deepfake’.

In the era of deepfakes, how is the voting public to know what is true and what is not?

I should stress at this point that I have not gone online to search out the tape in question and assess its provenance. All I do know is the candidate was swift to cite ‘deepfake’ in his defence. And not just deepfake, but dastardly, Israeli-originated deepfake. Ince was not content with simply denying the tape was real: it had to be the work of the Israelis.

This is a popular and common enough move in Turkey, as it is across much of the Islamic world.