Fake News: Concepts, Rhetorical Disruptions, and Policy Implications
Media, Society, and Culture Lesson Module Seeing Isn’t Believing RepresentUs, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons: A synthetic Kim Jong Un warns Americans—evidence that our eyes/ears are no longer reliable gatekeepers. This video clip is a "deepfake" of Kim Jong Un created in 2020 by RepresentUs, a non-partisan non-profit organization that produced it to raise public awareness about fake news in the emerging age of generative AI. The footage itself is fully synthetic, yet it’s an amalgamation from genuine video footage and voice samples of the North Korean leader drawn from publicly available news archives. It was intentionally designed to look real enough to unsettle us, but still recognizable as “fake” for educational purposes. Since 2020, of course, deepfake technology has advanced by orders of magnitude, in terms of realism, accessibility, and speed of production. ...