Opinion
Deepfakes might be dictators’ most powerful weapon yet
In 1984, George Orwell predicted totalitarians would command you to reject “the evidence of your eyes and ears”. To save democracy, we might just need to.
Misha ZelinskyColumnistWhen considering the threats to democracy in 2023, I did not have Pablo Xavier – a 31-year-old construction worker from Chicago – on my list.
Xavier sent the internet into meltdown after posting a photo of Pope Francis rocking a white puffer jacket that would have made Kim Kardashian proud. But rather than snapping the candid shot on his phone, Xavier used MidJourney — an artificial intelligence image generator — to create the so-called “deepfake” picture from scratch.
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