The White House wants to ‘cryptographically verify’ videos of Joe Biden so viewers don’t mistake them for AI deepfakes::Biden’s AI advisor Ben Buchanan said a method of clearly verifying White House releases is “in the works.”
I honestly do not see the value here. Barring maybe a small minority, anyone who would believe a deepfake about Biden would probably also not believe the verification and anyone who wouldn’t would probably believe the administration when they said it was fake.
The value of the technology in general? Sure. I can see it having practical applications. Just not in this case.
It helps journalists, etc, when files have digital signatures verifying who is attesting to it. If the WH has their own published public key for signing published media and more then it’s easy to verify if you have originals or not.
I don’t even think that matters when Trump’s people are watching media that won’t verify it anyway.
Problem is that broadly speaking, you would only sign the stuff you want to sign.
Imagine you had a president that slapped a toddler, and there was a phone video of it from the parents. The white house isn’t about to sign that video, because why would they want to? Should the journalists discard it because it doesn’t carry the official White House blessing?
It would limit the ability for someone to deep fake an official edit of a press briefing, but again, what if he says something damning, and the ‘official’ footage edits it out, would the press discard their own recordings because they can’t get it signed, and therefore not credible?
That’s the fundamental challenge in this sort of proposal, it only allows people to endorse what they would have wanted to endorse in the first place, and offers no mechanism to prove/disprove third party sources that are the only ones likely to carry negative impressions.
If a cryptographic claim/validation is provided then anyone refuting the claims can be seen to be a bad faith actor. Voters are one dimension of that problem but mainstream media being able to validate election videos is super important both domestically, but also internationally as the global community needs to see efforts being undertaken to preserve free and fair elections. This is especially true given the consequences if america’s enemies are seen to have been able to steer the election.
Sure, the grandparents that get all their news via Facebook might see a fake Biden video and eat it up like all the other hearsay they internalize.
But, if they’re like my parents and have the local network news on half the damn time, at least the typical mainstream network news won’t be showing the forged videos. Maybe they’ll even report a fact check on it?!?
And yeah, many of them will just take it as evidence that the mainstream media is part of the conspiracy. That’s a given.
