On Friday, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a (frankly, kind of funny) deepfake of his father’s chief rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis. It puts DeSantis’s face and voice onto the body of The Office‘s Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) during a scene where he is told by his coworker Darryl Philbin (played by Craig Robinson) that he is wearing a woman’s suit. The scene ends with Scott/DeSantis being embarrassed by the whole office for donning a female article of clothing, complete with the famous talking head that describes how he simply grabbed the suit at the store without even checking if it was for men.
Watch the deep fake for yourself. If you’ve seen DeSantis speak, the software Trump Jr. (or his team) used is actually very adept at mimicking the governor. It comes across as very real, though to a superfan of The Office like me, it feels a little awkward.
But this is an example of a fake that, in all seriousness, is pretty harmless and clearly not real.
However, let me give you a hypothetical. Say that instead of his spoof on The Office, Trump Jr. posted a clip of DeSantis giving a stump speech at some event. And when you hear the governor talk, he’s going on an inflammatory tirade against Trump and calls him a “criminal,” a “fraud,” and the “big loser of the 2020 election.” He tells the crowd that they’re a bunch of “racists and bigots” if they vote for Trump and that Trump supporters are “the worst the Republican Party has to offer.”
To the casual observer who perhaps isn’t super in the weeds about DeSantis’s campaign, there’s a really solid chance now that such a post would be extremely believable. AI has made great strides recently, after all. And if people believe it, they’ll retweet it, and retweet it, and retweet it. Maybe some publications that don’t fact-check will write articles about it, and even when the ruse is up, news outlets will report on the “viral deepfake of DeSantis trashing Trump,” and it will be a PR nightmare for DeSantis, not Trump, since Trump Jr. can claim that it obviously wasn’t real (in the bottom left corner of his actual deep fake, there’s a watermark for the software used to make it). All of a sudden, DeSantis is on defense for something he didn’t even do.
What I’ve just described likely won’t happen, but it is in the realm of possibility. And, may I just add, Donald Trump Jr. is not some unique mastermind of these. Supporters of candidates on both sides could easily take advantage of this technology. Voters need to be informed and not be tricked by what could come across as convincing videos (or even just photos) of famous political figures. MIT has a great article on detecting deep fakes but the long and the short of it is taking a full look at the media in question. Are there any glaring giveaways, like in the case of those fake photos of Pope Francis? Is the lighting consistent throughout? Are there any unusual facial movements? Facial features seem real, or “plastic” and imposed on the subject? In truth, while deep fakes are becoming more and more advanced it is still possible for a determined examiner to spot them if they look hard enough. The hope is that they don’t become too real.
