A good media environment is critical for a healthy and stable democracy.
The quality of our knowledge of public matters is
commensurate with the quality of the media that deliver us the information
upon which we rely to create our own opinion of what is right and what is wrong, whom to vote for or against, etc.
In 2023, pictures began circulating online of Donald Trump being forcibly restrained by New York Police Department officers.
The images were deep fakes created with an artificial intelligence image generating software,
and were shared on social networks without context, leading many to believe that the images were genuine.
That same year, another AI-generated picture of Pope Francis wearing a luxury white puffer jacket
also fooled many people.
The rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and realistic-looking image generation technologies
is not without consequences for our society and for democracy.
Deep fake videos have not yet reached the same level of realism, but it is only a question of time.
This is obviously very concerning.
Many people, and most importantly, many children and very young adults,
lack the ability to distinguish true from false.
The questions now are:
how to deal with these new threats?
How to educate our youths to grow up to be discerning?
What regulation to adopt?
The spreading of disinformation and hate speech through deepfakes
has a potential to undermine core functions and norms of democratic systems
by interfering with people's ability to participate in decisions that affect them,
determine collective agendas and express political will through informed decision-making.
This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.