The Deepfake Future

The idea for the event began “percolating,” said Professor Andrea Gabor, who has a home on Shelter Island, while she and panelist Don Waisanen were co-teaching an honors class last semester at Baruch College/CUNY titled “The News Media, Toxic Sludge and the Future of Democracy.”

A press release announcing the forum, which was held last week at LTV Studios in Wainscott, quoted Gabor as saying: “In the last 20 years, the U.S. has lost close to 3,000 local newspapers, or about one-third of all independent news outlets. The spread of news deserts has also fueled extremism and local divisions, fracturing local communities.

“Now, the World Wide Web allows both domestic actors and foreign powers to spread misinformation, fake news and propaganda. This is particularly troubling during an election year.”

The forum was titled “How To Confront Misinformation and Build Trust in the 2024 Election” and was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island and the North Fork. Gabor is a member of the chapter’s board of directors.

Gabor defined “disinformation” as “an attempt to deceive,” of “deliberately spreading lies or untruths,” and “misinformation” as putting this false information “forward.”

Key to this, she said, has been the emergence and huge spread of social media, which, with artificial intelligence, has now gone so far as to present “deep fakes.”

Gabor not only has an academic understanding of “deepfakes” but personal experience. She told of how, in recent times, “my likeness” and her voice — “speaking in fluent Chinese,” which she has never spoken — were aired in China. Professor Gabor was identified as “Lillian” on a TikTok associated site, where her phony self offered relationship advice and also peddled Russian honey.

“Chinese hackers,” said Gabor, had put this deepfake together.

Indeed, in June, the popular U.S. radio program “Marketplace” focused on what happened to her in a report that explained how “in the last eight months, more videos of foreigners generated by artificial intelligence, or deepfakes, have been popping up on Chinese social media.”

Of the fake “Lillian,” the program reported: “Her real name is Andrea Gabor, Bloomberg professor of business journalism at Baruch College at the City University of New York.”

“She was first informed of her deepfakes when ‘Marketplace’ reached out,” it said, quoting Gabor as saying: “I was stunned. First of all, I’m a relative nobody.”

As “Marketplace” said, “It’s not just politicians, celebrities and influencers who should be worried about their likeness being stolen. Gabor is active on X, formerly Twitter, but said she barely uses other social media platforms and thinks twice before putting things in email. That did not protect her.”

One doesn’t need to reach across the world to China to find examples of what’s been called a “post-truth era.”

Gabor, at the forum, referred to how, in the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris early last month, Trump declared that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

David Muir, the ABC News anchor co-moderating the debate, immediately fact-checked Trump’s claims, saying that the city manager in Springfield told ABC that this was a phony claim. And, at the LTV forum, Gabor noted how Republican officials in Ohio said it was false.

But that hasn’t stopped the untruth being accepted by many as true. Just last week, Congressman Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, posted on X: “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu [voodoo] … All these thugs better get … their ass out of our country before January 20th,” the date of the presidential inauguration.

Professor Waisanen provided a “cheat sheet” that filled a screen, displaying resources for fact-checking and what is now called “media literacy.” These sites included “PolitiFact,” “Verify This” and “MediaWise Teen Fact-Checking Network.”

The author of seven books, he spoke of journalists having a lesser part these days in “gatekeeping” in the transmission of information and, meanwhile, there is “so much incentive to disseminating lies” and “creating outrage” in people. “The infrastructure we have is not set up” to stop it, he said.

Panelist Sonia Jarvis, an attorney who co-authored two of those books and is a lecturer at Baruch’s School of Public and International Affairs, said major failures were the exemption of social media from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which undid a century of campaign finance rules.

Of the informational future, she said, “I am not optimistic.” But she said a promising avenue in getting needed regulation is dealing with how social media is “hurting our children.”

Joining the panel midway was Bonnie Michelle Cannon, executive director of the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center and also a member of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission, and Minerva Perez, executive director of Organizacion Latino Americana of Eastern Long Island.

Cannon emphasized how people need to “slow down” and “get back to reading again … You have to read, you have to research.”

Perez said that “misinformation and disinformation and fear doesn’t just land itself and stay around the internet in a mean and ugly way. It turns into literal violence that kills people.”