The clips are produced by Future Advocacy and intend to show that people can no longer necessarily trust what they see in videos, not just to question what they read and hear.

Here’s the Johnson video:

Boris Johnson has a message for you.#GE2019 pic.twitter.com/ST4dXPbRYE

— Future Advocacy (@FutureAdvocacy) November 12, 2019

And here’s the Corbyn video:

Jeremy Corbyn has a message for you.#GE2019 pic.twitter.com/mUlarnQmRW

— Future Advocacy (@FutureAdvocacy) November 12, 2019

In the era of fake news, people are becoming increasingly aware not to believe everything they read. Training the general population not to always believe what they can see with their own eyes is a lot more challenging.

At the same time, it’s also important in a democracy that media plurality is maintained and not too much influence is centralised to a handful of “trusted” outlets. Similarly, people cannot be allowed to just call something fake news to avoid scrutiny.

Future Advocacy highlights four key challenges:

1. Detecting deepfakes – whether society can create the means for detecting a deepfake directly at the point of upload or once it has become widely disseminated.
2. Liar’s dividend – a phenomenon in which genuine footage of controversial content can be dismissed by the subject as a deepfake, despite it being true.
3. Regulation – what should the limitations be with regards to the creation of deepfakes and can these be practically enforced?
4. Damage limitation – managing the impacts of deepfakes when regulation fails and the question of where responsibility should lie for damage limitation.

Areeq Chowdhury, Head of Think Tank at Future Advocacy, said:

“Deepfakes represent a genuine threat to democracy and society more widely. They can be used to fuel misinformation and totally undermine trust in audiovisual content.

Despite warnings over the past few years, politicians have so far collectively failed to address the issue of disinformation online. Instead, the response has been to defer to tech companies to do more. The responsibility for protecting our democracy lies in the corridors of Westminster not the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.

By releasing these deepfakes, we aim to use shock and humour to inform the public and put pressure on our lawmakers. This issue should be put above party politics. We urge all politicians to work together to update our laws and protect society from the threat of deepfakes, fake news, and micro-targeted political adverts online.”

Journalists are going to have to become experts in spotting fake content to maintain trust and integrity. Social media companies will also have to take some responsibility for the content they allow to spread on their platforms.

Social media moderation

Manual moderation of every piece of content that’s posted to a network like Facebook or Twitter is simply unfeasible, so automation is going to become necessary to at least flag potentially offending content.

But what constitutes offending content? That is the question social media giants are battling with in order to strike the right balance between free speech and expression while protecting their users from manipulation.

Just last night, Twitter released its draft policy on deepfakes and is currently accepting feedback on it.

The social network proposes the following steps for tweets it detects as featuring potentially manipulated content:

• Place a notice next to tweets that share synthetic or manipulated media.
• Warn people before they share or like tweets with synthetic or manipulated media.
• Add a link – for example, to a news article or Twitter Moment – so that people can read more about why various sources believe the media is synthetic or manipulated.

Twitter defines deepfakes as “any photo, audio, or video that has been significantly altered or fabricated in a way that intends to mislead people or changes its original meaning.”

Twitter’s current definition sounds like it could end up flagging the internet’s favourite medium, memes, as deepfakes. However, there’s a compelling argument that memes often should at least be flagged as modified from their original intent.

Take the infamous “This is fine” meme that was actually part of a larger comic by KC Green before it was manipulated for individual purposes.

In this Vulture piece, Green gives his personal stance that he’s mostly fine with people using his work as a meme so long as they’re not monetising it for themselves or using it for political purposes.

On July 25th 2016, the official Republican Party Twitter account used Green’s work and added “Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #DemsInPhilly #EnoughClinton”. Green later tweeted: “Everyone is in their right to use this is fine on social media posts, but man o man I personally would like @GOP to delete their stupid post.”

Raising awareness of deepfakes

Bill Posters is a UK artist known for creating subversive deepfakes of famous celebrities, including Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian. Posters was behind the viral deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg for the Spectre project which AI News reported on earlier this year.

Posters commented on his activism using deepfakes:

“We’ve used the biometric data of famous UK politicians to raise awareness to the fact that without greater controls and protections concerning personal data and powerful new technologies, misinformation poses a direct risk to everyone’s human rights including the rights of those in positions of power.

It’s staggering that after 3 years, the recommendations from the DCMS Select Committee enquiry into fake news or the Information Commissioner’s Office enquiry into the Cambridge Analytica scandals have not been applied to change UK laws to protect our liberty and democracy.

As a result, the conditions for computational forms of propaganda and misinformation campaigns to be amplified by social media platforms are still in effect today. We urge all political parties to come together and pass measures which safeguard future elections.”

As the UK heads towards its next major election, there is sure to be much debate around potential voter manipulation. Many have pointed towards Russian interference in Western democracies but there’s yet to be any solid evidence of that being the case.

Opposition parties, however, have criticised the incumbent government in the UK as refusing to release a report into Russian interference. Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton branded it “inexplicable and shameful” that the UK government has not yet published the report.

Allegations of interference and foul play will likely increase in the run-up to the election, but Future Advocacy is doing a great job in highlighting to the public that not everything you see can be believed.

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Johnson opened his speech going over some of the usual things he says would be expected of a British PM: advancing democratic values, rules of a peaceful world, protecting freedom of navigation at sea, and finding a “two-state” solution to the conflict in the Middle-East.

“Of course, I’m proud to do all these things,” says Johnson. “But, no-one can ignore a gathering force that is reshaping the future of every member of this assembly. There has been nothing like it.”

Examples are given of past technological achievements such as the steam engine, aviation, and nuclear. Ultimately, all of these technologies were controlled by humans – for better or worse.

Automation, by its very nature, is increasingly taking away human control. Just earlier this week, AI News reported on comments by Microsoft chief Brad Smith who warned that killer robots are ‘unstoppable’ and a new digital Geneva Convention is needed.

Before sharing his personal concerns about emerging technologies like AI and the IoT, Johnson acknowledges their huge potential benefits.

“Smart cities will pullulate with sensors, all joined together by the Internet of Things,” says Johnson. “So no bin goes unemptied, no street unswept, and the urban environment is as antiseptic as a Zurich pharmacy.”

“Voice-connected connectivity will be in every room and almost every object. Your mattress will monitor your nightmares, your fridge will beep for more cheese, your front door will sweep wide open the moment you approach like some silent butler, your smart meter will go hustling on its own accord for the cheapest electricity.”

Of course, Johnson isn’t here to advertise the benefits of emerging technologies but to warn of the challenges they will present to nations around the world.

“They could also be used to keep every citizen under round-the-clock surveillance,” explains Johnson. “Every one of them will be minutely transcribing your every habit in tiny electronic shorthand – stored not in their chips where you can find it – but in some great cloud of data that hangs ever more oppressively over the human race.”

Johnson expresses the concern that, with each click or tap, we are ourselves becoming a resource.

Mass amounts of data about people is indisputably becoming ever more valuable. This could be for purposes such as targeting and influencing public opinion, as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or for things such as training AI models.

“Data is the crude oil of the modern economy and we’re now in an environment where we don’t know who should own these new oil fields, who should have the rights or the title to these gushes of cash, and we don’t know who decides how to use that data.”

Johnson presents the audience with a series of rhetorical questions about the future of AI and the societal impacts it could have:

“Can these algorithms be trusted with our lives and our hopes? Should the machines decide whether or not we are eligible for a mortgage or insurance? What surgery or medicines we should receive? Are we doomed to a cold and heartless future in which a computer says yes or no with the grim finality of an emperor in the arena? How do you plead with an algorithm? How do you get it to see extenuating circumstances? How do we know that the machines have not been insidiously-programmed to fool us?”

Providing an example of how AI is being used today for malicious purposes, Johnson highlights that algorithms are enabling real-time censorship on messaging platforms in some countries.

“The digital authoritarianism is not alas the stuff of dystopian fantasy, but an emerging reality. The reason I’m giving this speech today with this gloomy proem is that the UK is one of the world’s tech leaders, and I believe governments have been simply caught unawares by the unintended consequences of the internet.”

Despite his warnings, Johnson says he’s optimistic about the ability of new technologies to “serve as a liberator and remake the world wondrously”.

Johnson points towards breakthroughs in nanotechnology allowing the development of robots a fraction the size of red blood cells that can swim through our bodies releasing medicine and attacking malignant cells. He also highlights neural interface technology which is enabling new cochlear implants and giving hearing to those without; allowing them to hear loved ones and sounds once again, or, perhaps, even for the first time.

“How we design the emerging technologies behind these breakthroughs and what values inform their design will shape the future of humanity,” says Johnson. “At stake is whether we bequeath an Orwellian world designed for censorship, oppression, and control; or a world of emancipation, debate, and learning. Where technology threatens famine and disease, but not our freedoms.”

Johnson acknowledges the work going on around the world to come up with rules around the development of groundbreaking technologies such as AI which will have a major effect on the very fabric of our societies:

“Month-by-month, vital decisions are being taken in academic committees, company boardrooms, and industry standards groups, they are writing the rulebooks of the future – making ethical judgments, choosing what will or will not be rendered possible. Together, we need to ensure that new advances reflect our values by design.

There is excellent work being done in the EU, the Commonwealth, and, of course, the UN, which has a vital role in ensuring that no country is excluded from the wonderful benefits of this technology and the industrial revolution it is bringing about.

But we must be still more ambitious. We need to find the right balance between freedom and control, between innovation and regulation, between private enterprise and government oversight. We must insist that the ethical judgments inherent in the design of new technology are transparent to all and we must make our voices heard more loudly in the standards bodies that write the rules. Above all, we need to agree a common set of global principles to shape the norms and standards that will guide the development of emerging technology.”

There are few better places to make the case for a new digital Geneva Convention as envisioned by Brad Smith than at the UN. Johnson used his speech to advocate for a new universal declaration and invited world leaders to a summit in the UK:

“Seven decades ago, this general assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with no dissenting voices, uniting humanity for the first time behind one set of principles. Our joint declaration upholds freedom of opinion and expression, the privacy of home and correspondence, and the right to seek and impart information and ideas. Unless we ensure that new technology reflects this spirit, I fear that declaration will mean nothing and no longer hold. So, the mission of the United Kingdom – and all who share our values – must be to ensure that emerging technologies are designed from the outset for freedom, openness, and pluralism; with the right safeguards in place to protect our peoples.

I invite you next year to a summit in London. We have, in the UK, by far, the biggest tech sector – fintech, biotech, edtech, medtech, nanotech, greentech, every kind of tech – in Europe.

We will seek to assemble the broadest possible coalition to take forward this vital task, building on all the UK contributes to this mission as a global leader in ethical and responsible technology. If we master this challenge, and I have no doubt that we can, then we will not only safeguard our ideals, we will surmount the limits that once constrained humanity and conquer the perils that once ended so many lives.”

Johnson ends on a positive note, with a rallying call to world leaders that it is possible to unlock the huge benefits of emerging technologies – while minimising their downsides – with a united approach.

“Together, we will vanquish killer diseases, eliminate famine, protect the environment, and transform our cities. Success will depend now, as ever, on freedom, openness, and pluralism; the formula that not only emancipates the human spirit, but releases the boundless ingenuity and inventiveness of mankind. And which, above all, the United Kingdom will strive to preserve.”

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