Russian President Vladimir Putin has a message for the United States. “People are divided. Their constituencies are rigged. Polling places are closing, so millions cannot vote,” he says.
None of the videos are authentic. Both were created for RepresentUS, a non-profit anti-corruption and good governance organization, by an advertising agency using “deepfake” technology. “This footage is not real, but the threat to democracy is.”
Deepfakes are realistic-looking video fakes created using a form of artificial intelligence. Most involve grafting one person’s head onto the body of another, but a similar method can be used to create a fully made-up face. Since its first appearance in 2017, most deepfakes have involved putting celebrity heads on the bodies of pornographic actors, but many experts have expressed concerns that the technology could be used in political disinformation campaigns.
In this case, RepresentUS has tried to harness that idea, but uses technology to raise awareness of what it sees as the most pressing threats to American democracy from policies it believes disenfranchise voters, such as policies designed to make it harder. to register and cast a vote.
“We believe that the United States government should represent all Americans,” said Joshua Lynn, co-founder and president of RepresentUS.
Lynn said that RepresentUS is a nonpartisan organization and that it counts Democrats and Republicans among its supporters and advisers, although it acknowledges that in the current presidential election, President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting by mail and his efforts to encourage officials state and county to close Polling places, particularly in areas expected to vote heavily in favor of Democrats, are anathema to the group’s views.
Kevin Mulroy, the agency’s executive creative director, said the challenge was to find a way to grab people’s attention and make them worry about the disintegration of democracy without falling into partisan debate. The team had the idea to use the perspective of foreign dictators who supported the collapse of American democracy, he said. At first, they considered hiring actors to play fictional dictators, but decided that using images of real foreign leaders who have an interest in seeing America’s stumble would be more effective.
Lynn said she liked the idea because it allowed RepresentUS to show the threat of both national political developments and this emerging new technology.
Creating the realistic deepfakes was not an easy process, said Bianca Guimaraes, another Mischief executive creative director who worked on the campaign. The firm chose actors with body types similar to those of the two dictators to produce images that could be used to train the deepfake algorithm. He also had to find enough video footage of the two foreign leaders to train an effective deepfake. This made the video of Kim more difficult because there are relatively few video footage of the elusive North Korean dictator, Guimaraes said. Mischief also hired native Russian and Korean speakers to express the dictator’s two lines in the videos, adding an additional touch of realism.
The videos were supposed to have been broadcast on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC in the Washington, DC area, immediately after Tuesday’s presidential debate, but all three networks refused to run the ads at the last minute and removed them without explanation.
Facebook has previously said that it will ban any video created with deepfake technology, regardless of its content.
Lynn acknowledges that there is something unsettling about seeing near-perfect but not completely digital avatars of Putin and Kim celebrating the growing failures of the American political system, even if people know that the videos are not real.
“If it makes people a little uncomfortable, that’s fine,” Lynn said. “People should be a little uncomfortable with what is happening in America right now, regardless of the political party.”
