Why Britain’s ‘deepfake election’ never happened – POLITICO

“Others were very quick to say this is artificially generated,” he noted. But he warned: “Everyone we talk to agrees that you can’t actually say that. It’s just not possible.”

It will, he added, become “increasingly difficult” for even dedicated fact checkers to assess the veracity of political clips, thanks to the pace of technological progress.

‘Shift reality’

Even the cruder clips can have an impact if seeded in just the right way, according to Marcus Beard, a former No.10 Downing Street communications advisor who led on countering disinformation during the Covid pandemic and now runs agency Fenimore Harper.

Bread tracked an uptick in Google searches for Streeting and Palestine after the deepfake dropped — a potential indicator it had cut through at a local level.

By flooding online community groups or WhatsApp chats with deepfakes, hostile actors have the opportunity to influence less engaged voters who are less likely to notice a politician’s voice doesn’t sound accurate or see the subsequent rebuttals.

And he said: “If you are a bad actor you don’t want to create that big national news story because you’ll get debunked really easily. You can’t truly shift subjective reality, but you can shift people’s subjective reality.”

That means the UK’s lucky escape this time around should not lull officials, regulators and tech firms into a false sense of security — especially after this summer’s far-right riots, in part fueled by online misinformation, gripped Britain.

“It’s like a child burning their fingers on a hobby,” Cap said. “The child is not really going to learn not to touch the hob until they’ve been burnt.”