Can you spot the deepfake? How AI is threatening elections

[Music] let's play a game I going to show you two videos one is real one is altered by AI Can you spot the Deep fake prime minister Justin tro recommended one of these books which one the book that I got excited about reading through it's called this can't be happening in McDonald Hall it's called how the Prime Minister stole Freedom yeah it was the last one the Prime Minister never said that okay round two if you can see I hope to finish this talk show one day will the fake Morgan Freeman please stand up I

am not Morgan Freeman and what you see is not real how about these videos of Florida Governor Ronda santis did the presidential hopeful say this I'm the only one that could possibly compete with Donald Trump or this I took some very bad advice I did some Very Bad Things things the last one is fake made to make you think that Dan santis was dropping out of the race Ed look at the mouth out of syn to the voice I never should have challenged president Trump One giveaway to a deep fake for now from Hollywood to

Washington to Ottawa deep fakes are confusing reality with AI frauders can take three second recording of your voice I've watched one of me on a couple I see said when the hell did I say that spend enough time scrolling like me you start questioning everything on your screen how do I know that you're not a deep fake Ah that's the right question isn't it honey fared specializes in digital forensics out of the University of California Berkeley if you're trying to create a 10-second hot mic of the Prime Minister saying something inappropriate that'll take me two

minutes to do um and very little money and very little effort and very little skill okay so a video of a politician swearing or dancing won't set off National Security Alarms president Trump is a total and complete dip but as AI technology gets better and more believable theed worries about populations primed for manipulation what concerns me a great deal in this country in particular is how partisan we are and when you have that kind of deep deep partisanship that outright hatred of the other side not just disagreement the disinformation campaigns are much more effective because

they will take hold because everybody's already there here's something you might have seen before on your social media feed on artificial intelligence a deep fake of the Nationals Ian Hannah maning that seems to be selling cryptocurrency more than 765 it's a scam he never recorded that it's made with AI okay but what if during the next election you see multiple videos that look and sound like a journalist do you trust telling you the date of the election has changed would you believe it I think that's really scary when you think about leas that uh what

12 hours before election day go super nova viral it doesn't matter if you correct the Record 12 hours later the the damage has been done it's that threat to democracy that rattles this conservative MP politicians have large digital Footprints you know I have over a decade worth of speeches that are on the internet writing videos it' be very easy for somebody to put together a deep Pig video of me worried that Parliament isn't moving fast enough Michelle rmle Gardner helped set up a nonpartisan working group to tackle AI we haven't even dealt with telephone scams

as a country right like we really haven't dealt with like beta version phone scams and now here we are with very sophisticated technology that anybody can access and come up with very realistic videos like inde decipher are indistinguishable between the real thing and what's been produced the question really is is Canada ready to deal with this like these are not conversations that are happening front and center and Parliament right now and that is concerning not far from Parliament the worst case scenario is top of mine Canada's cyber spies are already sounding the alarm about our

first AI election Carolyn Exavier is the chief of the communication security establishment or the sister agency to ceases this is what we fear is potentially that there could be a foreign interference so grave that then the Electoral results are are brought into question simply put is Canada ready for its deep fake election there's lots of work we continue to need to do with regards to education and you know citizenship literacy but do I think we CC is ready the Cyber Center absolutely I think we're ready because this is what we train for this is where

what we get ready for this is why we develop our people we anticipate the worst um I'm hoping it won't happen but we're ready ready to help allies like the US with their election this year when it comes to our election CC has the power to knock dangerous content offline but even then it doesn't have a Magic Bullet To Kill deep fakes the reality of it is yes it would be great to say that there's this one tool that's going to help us decipher the Deep fake we're not there yet and and and I don't

know that that's the focus we should have our focus should truly be in creating professional skepticism of the stories that are out there so that we could have critical thinking happening every time we're looking at the the news or we're looking at the the information that is at our disposal so how do you do that remember the game I played with you earlier okay so let's play this game well Scott D young created a board game to fight disinformation I'm the good person and you're trying to spread conspiracy theorist I am the conspiracy theorist his

research at Montreal's Concordia University is teaching people how online Echo Chambers and conspiracy theories work he says defects are designed to get us when we're most vulnerable when we're scrolling on social media we don't want to have our brains on we're tired we're not actually engaging with content we're just kind of mindlessly scrolling maybe laughing and sharing something with our friends and that's not a time when we're going to do those steps of like okay we're going to stop we're going to pause we're going to reflect can we actually teach people not to fall for

fake content I would love to say yes like we can teach people the skills to recognize when content is misleading my actual advice for people during these kind of election times is to try to watch things live because it's a lot harder to see the Deep fakes or the false content when it's when you're watching the live version with the year of Elections upon us including maybe candidas experts say the best strategy is to act now or come election day we might all lose