Deepfake Politics: What did we make?

I want to apologize for the role I have played in creating a mess. You see a few years ago, I decided to write computer programs to look at images. Matrices are numbers- throw on a few equasions...Well, it all seemed innocent enough.

Fast forward a few years to now and... the fields of image processing and machine learning have made, let's say, children. Through current generative and adversarial algorithms, w.e can make fake images almost impossible to detect as fakes. The political implications of this algorithmic ability can not be overstated.

Last night my commute home was disrupted by protesters of police brutality. This morning, an officemate showed me video of some apparently schizophrenic guy naked and throwing rocks on a highway. Perhaps it was a deepfake, meant to scare people away from further protests. I'll probably never know. How will anyone even know what is real anymore? First technology effectively put us all in specific media channels through machine learning applied to marketing. Machines learned everyone's presumed ethnicity, consumption patterns, income...and put them into a sort of channel built on that. The algorithms are not perfect (I get adds targeted at Jews of Polish descent ), but close enough. I feel we have arrived at a point where misinformation can be targeted at us. Goodbye shared reality. Hello individualized delusions.

L