How Real Are Deepfakes?

• Pages: 2-3
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Author: John M. McNichols
• Subject Matter: Civil Law

Published in Litigation News Volume 48, Number 4, Summer 2 023. © 2023 by the Amer ican Bar Association . Reproduced with pe rmission. All rights re served. This info rmation or any porti on thereof may not be c opied or disseminated in an y

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By John M. McNichols, L itigation News Associat e Editor

How Real Are Deepfakes?

nological development has led to an array of legal reactions

at both federal and state levels, as well as calls to update the

Federal Rules of Evidence.

What Is a Deepfa ke?

Deepfakes are computer-generated video les that appear to

show a subject person saying or doing particular things that

he or she did not do. Although the subject of the video may

be entirely synthetic—i.e., a made-up person—the more well-

known use of deepfakes is the depiction of real persons in

unreal events and situations. Deepfakes differ from earlier

generations of manipulated photo and video les in that they

are enabled by a form of articial intelligence (AI) known as

“machine learning.”

Using existing video of a particular subject as training

data—say, clips of Tom Cruise from Mission: Impossible—a

computer can be taught to recognize the movements of the

subject’s face and then replicate those movements in an arti-

cial video le that appears to show the subject speaking. The

extraordinary realism of deepfakes stems from the use of a

second computer that, armed with genuine video footage of

the same subject, compares the articial le against the genuine

item attempting to identify any aws that reveal its counterfeit

nature. Over thousands or even millions of iterative rene-

ments, these two “adversarial networks” ultimately generate a

faked le that cannot be distinguished from the genuine item.

Although deepfakes were recently the exclusive domain of

© Getty Image s

Grand Moff Tarkin, the Death Star commander

who destroyed the peaceful planet Alderaan

in 1977’s Star Wars, played perhaps the most

intimidating villain of the movie, setting aside

Darth Vader himself. Fans unsurprisingly called

for his return in the later prequels depicting pre–Death Star

events, and a full 39 years after his debut, the Grand Moff

returned to the franchise in 2016’s Rogue One. For the sake

of franchise continuity, he was portrayed by the same actor,

the accomplished British thespian Peter Cushing. The strange

thing, though, was that Cushing had died in 1994, 22 years

before Rogue One’s release, and thus, all of his “acting” in the

prequel was computer-generated.

A year later, the technology used to resurrect Cushing

received a new name when a Reddit user gained popularity

by creating videos that falsely appeared to show mainstream

celebrities acting in pornographic scenes. His handle: “deep-

fakes.” Unlike the producers of Rogue One, who obtained

consent from Cushing’s family to use his likeness, “deep-

fakes” made no pretense of consent, exposing the technology’s

potential for nefarious uses. Since then, deepfake imagery has

become increasingly difcult to detect, and its potential for

abuse has extended well beyond celebrity parody.

In March 2022, for example, a deepfake circulating on

social media appeared to show Ukrainian President Volodymyr

Zelensky telling Ukrainian soldiers to surrender. The desire

to curb such potential abuses without inhibiting further tech-

SUMMER 2 023 • VOL. 48 NO. 4

2 | A BA LITIGATION SECTION

TECHNOLOGY