Why we need science more than ever in the deepfake era

Is anything real anymore? The reason I ask is that I just caught up on the clip of US comedian Bill Hader morphing into Tom Cruise that’s been going around. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on a YouTube channel called Ctrl Shift Face (you could say the clue’s in the name), where you can check out other celebrity swap-outs, like what The Shining would have been like if it had starred Jim Carrey instead of Jack Nicholson.

These deepfakes – video or audio clips in which the original players are pretty convincingly given someone else’s voice, appearance or mannerisms via computer technology – have become increasingly popular as entertainment. In fact, the digitization of humans has progressed to an extent that the world’s first ‘digital human’ TED talk took place in real time just a few months ago. The host, virtual avatar DigiDoug, is the work of the visual effects studio Digital Domain, which created the computer-generated villain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

I guess I can’t be too scandalized by all of this – as humans, we have been artificially changing our appearance for centuries, from the Ancient Egyptians and their kohl, through lead face paint and powder (which, as we found out, was most definitely not a good idea), to today’s enthusiastic adoption of apps like Snapchat and Facetune to ‘enhance’ our selfies. And I write as someone who was recently turned into a cartoon – by my own company, I might add. I won’t even go into celebrity makeovers, but two words: Simon Cowell.

It’s got to the point where we can’t even rely on the duck test anymore (this is based on the saying, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck). On the internet these days, there’s no guarantee the duck won’t turn out to be Donald Duck. Or even Donald Trump.

Where will it all end up? Will our future be one where nobody leaves home, and our deepfakes interact with one another online? How will we know who our friends are if they all look like celebrities on their Instagram profiles? I’m all for progress, but equally I’d like to know for sure whether it’s my wife or Beyoncé FaceTiming me from the supermarket.

The darker side of deepfakes is that nobody is immune from them – and if they started to destabilize our already shaky political environment for example, the consequences would be far from entertaining.

Thank goodness there’s one thing we can still believe in, and that’s science. Good old, reliable, verifiable science. It’s given us so much, from antibiotics and medical imaging to the theories that explain why things work the way they do. It gives us facts, and debunks myths.

Thanks to science, some of the problems we thought we’d never beat – like smallpox and acid rain – have largely been solved. And thanks to science, there could still be hope for the future, as we continue to make advances in areas like bio-based materials and renewable sources of energy.

I find it baffling when scientific theory is dismissed, especially when it happens in our mainstream media. The World Economic Forum published a good article about this a few years ago. The gist is that in a society ruled by opinions rather than facts, it’s too easy for fake news, conspiracy theories and misunderstandings to take over, and that we need to do more to make science accessible to everyone.

I couldn’t agree more, having personally been bombarded by fake news about mobile technology – most recently, 5G. I also watched a documentary called Behind the Curve, about Flat Earthers. It’s fascinating to me that people believe the Earth is flat – and that there’s a conspiracy to suppress the ‘truth’ about it. I mean, what happens when you get to the edge? Has anyone ever fallen off?

Now, you could argue that science also ultimately gave us deepfakes, and, as with other forms of cybercrime, a new battleground has opened up as researchers and other organizations work to combat misuses of the technology.

I believe they will, and I can’t wait to see what else science has in store for us. Now where’s my lab coat, or is there a Snapchat filter for that?

Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson