PerspectiveThe Deepfake iPhone Apps Are Here
On Sunday, Lawfare’s Jacob Schulz, like many Americans, woke up to see that President Donald Trump had retweeted a misleading gif of his presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Schultz notes that Trump’s dissemination of a deepfake video was met with alarm. David Frum, for example, noted the significance of the president’s retweet: “Instead of sharing deceptively edited video—as Trump and his allies have often done before—yesterday Trump for the first time shared a video that had been outrightly fabricated.” Schulz adds: “Soon, people will be able to use their iPhones not just to turn themselves into mildly convincing late-night comedians but to convincingly turn Joe Biden into whatever they want. When that happens, in the now-infamous words of Samantha Cole of Motherboard, ‘We are truly f****d.’”
Jacob Schulz writes in Lawfare that, like many Americans, he woke up Sunday (26 April) morning to see that President Donald Trump had retweeted a misleading gif of his presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
The president’s dissemination of the fake gif is already coming in for criticism. Writing in The Atlantic, in an article titled: “The Very Real Threat of Trump’s Deepfake: The President’s First Use of a Manipulated Video of his Opponent Is a Test of the Boundaries,” David Frum noted the significance of the president’s retweet: “Instead of sharing deceptively edited video—as Trump and his allies have often done before—yesterday Trump for the first time shared a video that had been outrightly fabricated.”
Schulz writes that Trump’s action in sharing this particular video had a special resonance for him, because it was made with one of the iPhone apps he has been playing around with for the past month. “I’ve been attempting to learn more about the democratization of what are called “deepfakes”—convincing videos that superimpose someone’s face on an already-existing video or photo or otherwise manipulate media to make it appear as if someone did or said something that never actually happened,” Schulz writes. He notes that the watermark on the bottom right-hand corner of the Biden gif, “muglife.com,” indicates that the gif came from Mug Life, an app that allows users to manipulate a still image of a person’s face.
He goes on to describe various apps, like Mug Life and Familiar, and how they allow users to create convincing fake videos.
He concludes:
At the end of the day, the dangers of the apps still remain largely nascent. Mug Life, Familiar and their analogs are unlikely to sway the 2020 election. For now, the biggest problem comes from cheap fakes—more rudimentarily edited deceptive videos—and clips that simply remove the underlying context of a politician’s comments. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fell victim to the former in May 2019, when the president shared a manipulated video of the speaker that appeared to depict her stammering, and Biden to the latter in January 2020, when a deceptively edited video began to circulate that appeared to show him espousing white nationalist tropes (in actuality, the clip came from a longer speech in which Biden critiqued American culture’s problems with sexual violence).
But in months or years, all types of iPhone-created kompromat will inch closer to photorealism. This will create huge problems for platforms; Twitter and Facebook will have to contend with many more deepfakes than pop up on the platforms today. For now at least, both platforms rely on bespoke takedowns and labeling and content moderators already besieged. When everyone with a smartphone can produce a semi-convincing deepfake, the equation will only get worse: An enormous volume of deepfakes will float around on the sites while moderators scramble to label or remove those that pass a certain threshold of traffic or abuse.
Soon, people will be able to use their iPhones not just to turn themselves into mildly convincing late-night comedians but to convincingly turn Joe Biden into whatever they want. When that happens, in the now-infamous words of Samantha Cole of Motherboard, “We are truly f****d.”
