We sympathize with those voters flummoxed by the welter of misinformation and still trying to make a decision which presidential candidate to choose. Even as they try to determine the validity of polls—on the one hand, the Wednesday morning front page of the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Trump was six points ahead of Biden in the critical battleground states, while on the other, a text message from the DNC said Biden was up by six percent—now comes deepfakes to further confuse the undecideds.
A deepfake, according to posts at MIT, is synthetic media, including images, videos, and audio, generated by artificial intelligence to portray something that does not exist in reality or events that have never occurred.
The photo of Trump posing gladly with six African Americans circulated on social media platforms is a good example of deepfake. And almost anything to do with Trump even without deepfake is false and fraudulent.
There have been few presidential elections as consequential and so besieged with lies and propaganda as the one this coming November. Added to this brew of unfiltered mishmash is Trump’s repeated promise of a “bloodbath” if he isn’t elected. In his speech on Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump doubled down on his previous warning and accused President Biden of unleashing “carnage, chaos and killing” in a country he said was flooded with drugs and besieged by foreign criminal gangs. “I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden’s border bloodbath…it’s a bloodbath, and it’s destroying our country and it’s a very bad thing happening.”
There are few things we can be certain of in these increasingly problematic times, but we disbelieve Trump at our peril, and that my friends is not deepfake.