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The People Onscreen Are Fake.
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The People Onscreen Are Fake.

The Disinformation Is Real.

Alan Satariano and Paul Mozur
The New York Times, 2023
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So-called “disinformation peddlers” can now produce cheap, but realistic, videos in misinformation campaigns designed to spread lies, disrupt international relations or create porn. New York Times reporters Alan Satariano and Paul Mozur warn that media manipulators now can build a humanlike online avatar “puppet” news announcer and program it to say and do anything desired, in credible tones and in any language or accent. While it’s still pretty easy to tell that the resulting broadcasts are fake, the technology is getting better and discerning who or what is real is only going to become more difficult.  

Summary

Using “deepfake” technology, bad faith actors can create realistic TV news segments to spread propaganda and false information.

For now, you usually can spot fake people in videos because of their pixilated images and stilted voices, but day by day the details are getting better and fakes are getting harder to detect. 

Researchers from Graphika, a company that researches the spread of disinformation, tracked propaganda videos from a fake network called Wolf News to a Chinese bot account. The researchers found that most of Wolf’s fake broadcasts promoted communist Chinese ideas and discredited the West.

Such deepfakes harness AI programming to manipulate real footage and to make the avatar on screen do and say anything the designer wishes. A recent, widely disseminated deepfake video purported to show Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy supposedly surrendering to the Russians. Another video showed fake evidence...

About the Authors

Adam Satariano, in London, and Paul Mozur, in Seoul, are New York Times tech correspondents who regularly report about online disinformation. Mozur was on the Times’ team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic.

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