
A
couple of artists teamed up with an advertising
company to create the
deepfake video of Mark Zuckerberg.
The video on Instagram shows what seems to be Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg giving a brief speech concerning the power of massive information.
“Imagine this for a second: One man, with
total control of
billions of people’s stolen information, all their secrets, their
lives, their futures. I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the information controls the future.”
Zuckerberg never uttered those
words. The video was a “deepfake,” a technique that uses AI to make videos of
people saying something they
didn’t, highlighting the
challenges social networks face when it comes to policing manipulated
content.
The Zuckerberg called Pelosi but she
wasn’t “eager” to hear what
he had to say, The
Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Facebook’s policy states that it doesn’t remove fake news however will reduce its reach on the site and show information from fact-checkers. It owns photo sharing site Instagram.
“We will treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on
Instagram,” a spokesperson for
the photo sharing website said. “If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we’ll filter it from Instagram’s
recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages.”
Fact-checker Lead Stories, which called the video “art,” said in a post that it’s flagging the video as satire and this
will not hurt the
video’s distribution. Users will see
a warning label that it isn’t real.
Artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe partnered
with advertising company Canny to create the video. It was created using Canny AI’s video dialogue
replacement (VDR) technology, according
to the Instagram post. The creators of the video used footage from
remarks Zuckerberg made concerning Russian election
interference in 2017. The video includes a CBS logo on the
right side and
includes a label that says “Zuckerberg:
We’re increasing transparency on ads.”
A spokesperson for
CBS, which owns
CNET, said in a statement that it asked
Facebook to “take down this fake,
unauthorized use of the CBSN trademark.”
Canny has also teamed up with Posters to create fake videos
of President Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian. Spectre, referenced in the video, is an art exhibit that occurred at the Sheffield Doc Fest in the United Kingdom. The Zuckerberg video was posted four days ago. Posters didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time a fake video
of Zuckerberg has been created. In 2018, filmmaker Andrew Oleck posted a video on Facebook that
showed what appears to
be Zuckerberg stating that he was deleting the social network, fooling some users into
thinking it was real, according to Gizmodo. The video,
titled “A World without Facebook,”
was viewed over 32million times, however the video that was
embedded in the Gizmodo
article is presently unavailable. Versions of that video,
though, are still on Facebook and YouTube.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are concerned about the use of
deepfakes in the 2020 U.S.A. presidential election.
On Thursday, the House
Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on manipulated
media and “deepfakes.”