In the third week of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky appeared in a video, dressed in a dark green shirt, speaking slowly and deliberately .
This was while standing behind a white presidential podium featuring his country’s coat of arms.
Except for his head, the Ukrainian president’s body barely moved as he spoke. His voice sounded distorted and almost gravelly as he appeared to tell Ukrainians to surrender to Russia.
“I ask you to lay down your weapons and go back to your families,” he appeared to say in Ukrainian in the clip, which was quickly identified as a deepfake. “This war is not worth dying for. I suggest you to keep on living, and I am going to do the same.”
Experts in disinformation and content authentication have worried for years about the potential to spread lies and chaos via deepfakes, particularly as they become more and more realistic looking. In general, deepfakes have improved immensely in a relatively short period of time. Viral videos of a faux Tom Cruise doing coin flips and covering Dave Matthews Band songs last year, for instance, showed how deepfakes can appear convincingly real.
Neither of the recent videos of Zelensky or Putin came close to TikTok Tom Cruise’s high production values (they were noticeably low resolution, for one thing, which is a common tactic for hiding flaws.) But experts still see them as dangerous. That’s because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further.
“Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist,” said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school’s Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. “If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It’s not like everything will become true. It’s just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything.”
