We Will Deep-Fake It For You Wholesale

Will AI Deep-Fake technology destroy the internet as we know it?

I recently spent a glorious few hours rewatching Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 masterpiece Total Recall. I love almost everything about Total Recall. I love the soundtrack, the special effects, Sharon Stone, and how spectacularly over the top it all is. For youngsters, Total Recall is a futuristic Sci-Fi action film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger receives a brain implant that creates a reality that he’s a secret agent on a mission to save the people of Mars from an evil corporate overlord. However, the treatment goes wrong, and he ends up living and experiencing it for real - or does he?

Based on Philip K Dick’s We Will Remember It For You Wholesale, the film induces a feeling of epistemic uncertainty within the audience. Are you in the dream, or is it ‘‘real’’? Like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and to a lesser degree The Matrix, Verhoeven’s film leaves the audience in a state of confusion and wonderment, questioning the nature of reality.

Such philosophical pondering entered my mind over the last week, as I found myself listening to full-time liberal and part-time actress Emma Watson reading passages from Mein Kampf and Rishi Sunak announcing plans to end multiculturalism and send all the immigrants back home. I found it more believable that Emma Watson would be reading the words of Adolf Hitler on the Jewish Question than that the Tories would do something about immigration, but as I’m sure you’ve realized by now, both were AI fakes.

Japanese people can now watch Total Recall, and they get to see Arnie mouthing perfectly in Japanese phrases such as ‘‘See you at the party, Richter!’’ or ‘‘Get your ass to Mars’’.

The conspiracy theorist in me does wonder at the seemingly rapid advance of deep-fake AI technology, which over the course of a single year seems to have become ubiquitous. In the spring and summer months, there seemed to be a sudden explosion of AI art imagery. Toward the end of 2022, we saw ChatGPT emerge to tell us that white men should always die in the trolley problem, and now most recently we’re witnessing the birth of perfect voice replication. Technology which until recently was only available to big-budget Hollywood studios is seemingly available to everyone with an iPhone.

Things have always been fake on the internet, but they’re about to get a lot faker.

Of course, the idea that the Conservative Party would actually care about the native British, or that Emma Watson was becoming a Neo Nazi, are both absurd, and very few people would take either seriously. However, creating fakes becomes more insidious when used to embolden a narrative that is not beyond the realm of possibility. There’s a screenshot of a supposed tweet by Bill Gates which goes around, in which he says:

‘‘Vaccines in our food supplies solves the problem of vaccine hesitancy’’

Bill Gates never tweeted the statement. It’s fake. The problem is, it is the type of thing Bill Gates would say. To put it another way, rightly or wrongly (in my view rightly) there exists within the cultural conversation the narrative that Bill Gates is a maniac who uses his money to manipulate the pharmaceutical industry and technology more generally in order to earn yet more money and cajole humanity into a trans-human future. The fake statement of putting vaccines into food supplies can instead be thought of as justified or merely the cherry on the cake, the ‘‘Chef’s Kiss’’ of the anti-Gates narrative.

In the not-too-distant future, if it hasn’t happened already, we will be dealing with Gate’s grating, Kermit-like voice saying all manner of dystopian utterances and psychotic statements, and they will be fake too. In fact, everything will be fake or doubted by virtue of the likelihood that it is fake.

Regular readers will be aware that I’m hardly any sort of technical guru or wizard, yet even I was able to make these images of an overwhelmed Chinese hospital dealing with a virulent new strain of Covid:

Or how about this village in Poland that was bombed by the Russians:

Not real!

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve reposted something on social media only to have somebody slip into my messages and tell me my scoop or hot-take was a fabrication, resulting in me taking it down and cursing the person who created it. The advent of the age of AI Deep-Fakes means the scope for confusion and navigating what is and what isn’t real, is about to exponentially increase. To ‘‘surf the web’’ will be more like wading through dense mud.

Again, it is perhaps a little paranoid of me, but I can’t help but get the impression that AI Deep-Fake technology is being used to ‘‘flood the zone’’ of alternative media and commentary spaces. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of the Fact Checkers and allegations being hurled around that this or that stance or opinion is misinformation or disinformation. The result was, in my view, unimpressive, with once respectable outlets such as Reuters being reduced to bootlicking water carriers rather than being perceived as purveyors of objective truth. Such institutions have haemorrhaged trust and respect carefully built up over decades, as time and time again they were caught out or had to backtrack.

But what if everything actually was fake?

I envision the future of social media as an unending ocean of rubbish, an incomprehensible plane of half-truths and lies, narratives based on nothing tangible, and identities built on algorithms. Social media personalities and famous writers will not even be human, but programs replicating what data processes as humans. Everything will be doubted and second-guessed, like a middle-aged man walking on ice, trying to land a footstep on something solid and reliable.

People might be inclined to think I’m over-egging the pudding a little to make a dramatic impact, but I’m not so sure. Consider my own content. The essays I write, which I also intend to turn into videos, tend to be on the long side. They’re my ‘‘deep dives’’. During the narration phase, reading, and recording, I have to pay attention not to stumble over words, mispronounce names, or cough or sniff too often. It requires a lot of attention and can be frustrating. Soon, it will be possible for me to simply get an AI app to read it through for me. I won’t be using AI in that way, but it will be increasingly common, and most of the time the audience won’t know either way.

It is the uncertainty of not knowing that will be the problem.

It’s curious that we do not hear much about the ‘‘Grey Goo Scenario’’ these days. In this hypothetical world-ending disaster, self-replicating nanobots consume all the world’s biomass, reducing the planet to a dead and sterile rock coated in the grey goo residue which is excreted.

It isn’t inconceivable that lunatic billionaires (Hello again Mr. Gates) and various governmental bodies will usher in the grey goo. In the meantime it may well be that AI does something similar to the internet.

There’s something thus far absent from all of this speculation: the word ‘‘verification’’. Who, or what, will constitute our guiding beacons in the information wasteland? It will be the ‘‘trusted sources’’ of the regime, of course.

The reason I cautiously adorned my tin foil hat for this article is that I can’t help but notice that swamping social media with AI-generated trash is the surest way to undermine the average person online while emboldening the mainstream sources who will now be once again heralded as the ‘‘truth’’.

The BBC, Guardian, and CNN will once more stand tall, jutting out of the barren junk desert the internet has become, glimmering like cathedrals over plague-infested lands.

The powers that be could also view the Deep-Fake problem as an opportunity, because, as ever, all the problems they create will also have solutions they already have mapped out. In this instance, the solution would be much tighter regulation of the internet, as well as the user needing an ID in order to access the internet in the first place.

And yet, despite it all, I’m not completely pessimistic. Fundamentally, the Deep-Fake issue is simply another manifestation of the decoupling of the self from authentic experience. It is another lurch toward the trans-human vision of free-floating consciousness existing in the plane of the purely subjective. There will be those who go willingly into the Matrix, literally creating their own utopia complete with the porn they designed themselves, and those of us who do not.

This, in the end, has been the story of the 2020s so far: the division between the compliant and the defiant.

During the cold snap before Christmas, I went rambling in Northumberland and took this photo:

I have no doubt that the right prompt in an AI app could make the picture more dramatic than it is. The photo is not simply an image to be consumed, though. I was actually standing there looking for deer footprints in the snow, operating a phone with frozen fingers and stamping my feet to warm them up.

The authentic human experience is being replaced by a simulacrum of experience, but its power wanes when you understand the trick. Many people will become unstuck given the opportunities arising from the ability to create their own realities, many others will become immunized to it, aloof and increasingly disconnected, living more, reading more, and writing more.

I’m not one known for optimism, but the self-inflicted wound of AI fakery may well open up spaces for a renewed authenticity, and I’ll be stumbling over words and sniffing in my monologues for the foreseeable future.