Can we trust our senses?

Who hasn’t thought of Skynet and the machine revolution when seeing certain innovations in fields such as artificial intelligence? And, if technology were to attack us, we may think it would be through some robot with a conscience, but what if it were much more human, subtle and devious? With that in mind, deepfakes have been on the rise. 

The current level of technology developed by the film industry is getting a little more than uncanny. And researchers from Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) already built a voice synthesizer AI capable of copying the sound and intonation of the voice of any person with incredible accuracy. 

The classic concern is that fake news could be spread by manipulating the words of political leaders and celebrities. And we wouldn’t be able to trust our eyes and ears. Because news cycles happen so fast, major reactions could occur after releasing deepfakes before they are exposed.

But, this technology has flaws, such as not being able to synthesize a person’s voice for an extended period, such as a lengthy speech. It automatically sounds unnatural. But this could just be the beginning. 

Also, more powerful graphics cards and processors could continue to be released by AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and machine learning and deepfaking could scale faster. Video and audio flaws might be reduced to the point where deepfakes could begin passing a Turing test of sorts. 

Although it seems that we are still far from reaching the point of Skynet-style global danger, I believe that we should not be overconfident. Perhaps our biggest enemy will be our own eyes and ears if we trust them too much.