Villasenor on Strategies to Guard Against ‘Deepfakes’
Public Policy Professor John Villasenor spoke to the Brookings Cafeteria podcast about strategies that voters and other consumers of digital media can adopt to guard against “deepfakes” — videos manipulated with artificial intelligence technology to deceive, parody or, sometimes, educate. “Anybody who has a computer and access to the Internet is in a position to produce deepfakes,” Villasenor said, but he added that the technology to detect the doctored videos is also quickly evolving. He urged consumers of digital media to “unlearn what we’ve learned since we were all small, which is usually seeing is believing. … Deepfakes scramble that understanding.” Even if a video is clearly fake, he said, “the visual imagery is very powerful and so I think it’s a big concern.” Villasenor is a professor of management, law and electrical engineering, in addition to public policy. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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