For the past few days, I have been fascinated by a story that took place last winter at Pikesville High School in Maryland. On January 17, after the circulation online of an audio clip in which the director of the establishment, Eric Eiswert, can be heard mocking black students and an employee, and Jewish parents, he found himself in a situation to which we are now very accustomed: a flood of calls for resignation on social networks, an investigation launched by the school board, a suspension, threatening private messages and harassment…
Business as usual for our public enemy of the week.
Except that Eric Eiswert had never said the words he was accused of. The whole thing was a fabrication. No one falls out of their chair: we’ve known for several years that hyperfakes (” deepfakes “) have achieved a remarkable level of credibility.
As early as 2017, Lyrebird, a young Montreal startup, attracted the attention of media around the world by presenting audio clips of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to demonstrate the potential of its technology. His ethical position was thoughtful and explicit: make technology accessible to as many people as possible, in order to make the public aware of its existence, which, it was hoped, would help them develop critical thinking, as Photoshop did for the photography.
We may still be in a period of transition, but I’m not sure that the laudable intentions of the creators of Lyrebird have had the desired results. Firstly because other less virtuous agents occupy the market. But also because fact-checking is work, and I’m pretty sure that the average bear doesn’t have the time or energy to do the most laborious and boring part of the job of journalist on the content of his TikTok feed.
Eric Eiswert’s story ends with some form of resolution: the alleged creator of the fake audio clip has been caught and is awaiting trial. It concerns a coach at the school who had been accused of embezzlement by the principal, and who was seeking revenge. However, there remain online a lot of traces of the accusations of racism launched on the basis of a false audio extract against the director, which will follow him forever: it is not exactly a happy ending.
There is, in this story, something a little more disturbing, I find, than the simple anecdote of a false accusation which places an innocent person in embarrassment.
The affair seems to me a good indicator of the “democratization” of hyperfaking in the service of increasingly harmless lies, a democratization which could erode trust not between citizens and those in power, but between citizens themselves.
It was obvious that hyperfaking tools would be used to lie about major causes, to make politicians or stars speak. It was in the order of things that it would serve as an electoral fraud scheme, in the United States, using the voice of Joe Biden. Shocking as they are, I didn’t fall out of my chair when pornographic hyperfakes of Taylor Swift circulated on social media over the winter. Same thing for the (obviously false) promises of free Le Creuset casseroles made online by the star.
Maybe I’m twisted, but I wasn’t surprised either when I saw the proliferation of cases of hyperfaking of pornography in secondary schools, which we saw in Spain, the United States, and even in Sainte-Thérèse, last winter. It is a truth of La Palice, in technology, that pornography has been one of the greatest engines of technological innovation, from the videocassette to the Internet via video on demand and artificial intelligence. In my time too, people used technology as an instrument of sexual violence, in more crude ways. Talk to the girl who undressed in front of her webcam on MSN Messenger at the request of a classmate she had a crush on. kick, on a Saturday evening. When he opened his webcam, he revealed that he was surrounded by a dozen other guys, all of whom had witnessed the striptease. Methods change, stupidity remains.
It also didn’t take me by surprise when I read the reported cases of hyperfakes used by fraudsters, even in Quebec. Fraud is never far behind porn in tech adoption.
What is new, and more worrying, to me is that someone sufficiently clever and ill-intentioned can rewrite a portion of reality in a less spectacular, but equally damaging, way in interpersonal relationships. And perhaps there, the (weakened and increasingly rare) ramparts of journalism, which make it possible to verify the authenticity of questionable content of public interest, will be of no use.
Imagine being sent a video of your spouse where you clearly see them kissing someone else. From a friend who gossips about you. From your business partner who admits to conspiring against you. With a little luck, you might have the reflex to stay on your guard, to do a thorough analysis, which would lead you to understand the origin of the video.
But if the proliferation of fake news and clickbait something that the 2010s taught us is that humans are extremely emotional and easily manipulated brats, and that once you make them angry, you can do whatever you want with them. You may fall into the trap, it happens to the best. Lies like this are designed to push your buttons.
We’re not putting the genie back in the bottle, and we’re not going to lock ourselves in a yurt without internet access in the depths of Témiscamingue, so the simplest solution is perhaps the one suggested by the founders of Lyrebird: know that these tools exist. Play with them. Perhaps in addition to helping you sharpen your critical thinking, it will allow you to come up with very good jokes, like making the Prime Minister of Quebec sing the unforgettable refrain of a certain restaurant-bar, or making him say “systemic racism exists, glory to a matriarchal society where housing is affordable, let’s liberate Palestine, yassss queen slay.”
Who is Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard?
- Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard is a novelist, playwright, actor and director.
- He notably published the novels Royal, Wildlife Handbook And High demolition. He has also written numerous plays, including Warwick, The singularity is near And You are animal.
- His novels Wildlife Handbook And High demolition were adapted for television.
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