Maybe you’ve seen the latest goofiness making the rounds. It goes like this: a close comparison of two videos of President Joe Biden shows that there are two people pretending to be the president. Or one real president and multiple deepfake presidents.
Obviously it’s total BS. Over at Vice’s Motherboard, they quite clearly explain why it’s BS.
But this whole thing was apparently started by a Dallas guy named Bradley James Skistimas who makes music for children as the Juicebox Jukebox. Here’s his website. Skistimas has also performed as Five Times August, whose Twitter account he used last week to get the goofiness started. I am not going to link to it. He posted a video supposedly showing Biden deepfakery. It has been viewed 1.4 million times. Other posts on his feed promote antivaxxery and Herschel Walker, who is running for a Senate seat in Georgia and who has claimed he was an FBI agent and came close to murdering someone until voices in his head told him not to do it.
I sent Skistimas an email asking if he’d like to talk about some of this. No response.
Anyway. I’ll leave you with a thought about deepfakes and what they are doing to our perception of reality. Here’s how Motherboard put it: “When deepfakes first came on the scene in late 2017, after Motherboard found someone tinkering with face-replacing AI algorithms that put celebrities’ faces in porn, one of the biggest concerns experts raised was about the threat to our shared reality: once the public can call into question the authenticity of every image and video that’s disseminated online, it’s very hard to convince people that anything is trustworthy, anymore.”
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