The dawn of Photoshop was a scary thing in many respects. In this day and age pictures of people, even very convincing pictures, can be faked with startling accuracy. Today video is the gold standard for truth. Faking video is much more expensive than faking photos, generally takes much more time, and most importantly is very difficult to do with any amount of accuracy when it comes to making it seem like someone did something they didn't do.
New, tantalizing breakthroughs in machine learning and video editing technology have now crossed this barrier.
Mimicking people has long been the holy grail of video for some time now. From young Princess Leia's appearance in the recent Rogue One Star Wars movie to young Tony Stark in the Captain America: Civil War movie, we've been dancing around the edge of complete believably for false people in video for some time now.
However, machine learning advances have taken things to the next stage, allowing a single individual or small team with powerful enough computers to create false video relatively easily. Just look at this video of President Obama giving the same speech in several different ways. The original video and sound were captured, then the computer was able to fake several copies with, from what I can tell, near flawless accuracy.
Oh, and did I mention that people are already using this stuff to make porn?
In a truly terrifying display of the capabilities of this technology, a new trend of Deep Fakes, machine learning created video of famous women edited to look like they are engaged in explicit sex acts on camera, has begun to take hold. Forget having your sex tape leak.... they can make a realistic sex tape from scratch now, whether you made one or not. I can't imagine what it must feel like to watch yourself be made to do perform some act on camera that you'd never do on camera... if at all.
On the other hand, much like today with photos, the emergence of falsified video gives a much better level of plausible deniability than ever before. Once the idea that videos can be falsified begins to take hold, people will begin to question what they see a lot more. The results, much like with photos, will likely be mixed. This technology isn't coming: it's already here. And there really isn't any going back.
Take a look at President Obama's fake speech videos below: