There seems to be a lot of concern about deepfake photos and videos going viral on the internet. The AI generated photos of Donald Trump being arrested and the fake lute photos of Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl are just some of the more recent examples. Even though these photos might seem real at first, there's a number of ways that you can try to identify a deepfake pretty easily. Usually the hands of the face give it away with some really uncanny features. Jullory and backgrounds, especially when they are very intricate, tend to trip up AI. In fact, if you know what to look for, I would say that identifying a deepfake is actually a lot easier than identifying a Photoshop. Because with those Photoshopped images or images that are edited in Gimper, any other program like that, you gotta zoom in usually and look around the edges for pixel mismatches and like color mismatches, or you gotta look at shadows and differences in the lighting to see if something just isn't right. But it's usually a lot harder to identify a Photoshop than a deepfake, plus with the current technology someone that's really skilled at Photoshop or Gimper, can create a specific kind of image a lot easier than, I guess, a prompt engineer could create a specific kind of deepfake. But with every single big tech company investing in AI right now, the technology, this deepfake technology, it's gonna keep getting better and most people out there right now, they don't know how to keep up with the new technology. I mean, they're still lagging behind not even able to verify who their emails are really coming from or how to verify just about anything digitally, yet more and more of these people want to use social media in beyond line. So we may soon get to a point where the majority of people that are online just don't know how to verify whether or not something they are looking at or reading or watching is real or AI generated. A lot of people are concerned with deepfakes influencing elections. In fact, the White House has said that they want to come up with a way to cryptographically verify videos of Joe Biden so that viewers don't mistake them for all the deepfakes that are floating around out there. And of course, there's already been a campaign of robo calls going on for months now where it kind of sort of sounds like Joe Biden telling people that the midterms are just a bunch of malarkey and that they should save their vote for the primaries. So how could the White House or really anybody go about cryptographically verifying their videos in order to fight against somebody creating a deepfake about them? Well, asymmetric cryptography tools like PGP, they honestly sound like a perfect candidate to me. Public private key pairs, they have already been used for years to verify things like websites, certificates, software packages, communications, and they make up the foundation of cryptocurrency, right? Verifying these money transactions. You can cryptographically sign any kind of file, you know, text files, video photos, you can create archives of a bunch of files and then you can sign that and then people could verify it with your public key. But the real question is how many people are going to actually add the White House's public key into their key rings and then use it to verify pictures and videos of the president? I mean, how many people have these public key rings, right? Like I said, the tech to verify files with public private key pairs has been around for years now. And if there ever was a time when the general public would have been using this technology the most to verify things or really software, I think that probably would have been in the 2000s and maybe early 2010s before most people were getting their software from official sources like the Microsoft store, the Google Play Store, and the Apple store because back then the way most people got stuff was they would just go on to Google and they would type in, you know, download whatever name of the program they wanted and then hopefully the results that they would get from Google would be the author of the software's website or possibly an official source forage link, you know, where the author posted the binary for them to download. But looking back, the amount of Trojans and viruses that people were still downloading from websites tells me that people were not regularly verifying the software that they were downloading or even verifying that they were downloading it from the right website. So these days with the official software repositories like Google Play Store, Apple Store, and so on, these verifications that people would have theoretically done by themselves are now done by the companies who created these official repositories and the authors of the software they don't even bother posting keys for people to verify their software independently anymore, at least most of the time they don't do this. But I don't even think people's lack of familiarity with PGP is the biggest problem with deep fakes or the biggest problem with them going viral and being believed by the public. Because I think the real issue, which probably can't be fixed with any kind of software or technology, is the fact that people want to believe fake things are real, okay, whether it's deep fakes of Donald Trump getting arrested or, you know, again Taylor Swift getting freaky with the Kansas City fans, right, those fake photos, the people who believe these images, they either don't have a healthy amount of skepticism about what they see on the internet and they were probably the same kind of people that believe in stuff like ghost videos or I remember those pictures of giant skeletons that went viral on the internet years ago or when it comes to deep fakes that are being used for political propaganda specifically, they honestly aren't even necessary, right, they're not necessary as a tool of propaganda because we've seen time and time again over the years, whether it's Russian collusion conspiracies, QAnon or coronavirus, that people are going to latch onto these ridiculous political narratives that have little to no evidence to back them up. And when you present evidence to these people that shows them that they're wrong, they tend to become even more steadfast in their beliefs, right, this is just kind of a natural, I guess, condition of the human mind. So cryptographic signatures are not going to do anything to dissuade those people and the white house should know this, right, I mean, this is something that's again just in human nature that's been going on for years. So what I would be more wary of here than the deep fakes themselves being used for propaganda is deep fakes being used as a scapegoat to implement a centralized method of cryptographic verifications, I guess sort of like a PGB key server, but in reality, it would probably be something that's much more proprietary and more controlled. And you know, if that particular verification server becomes the only trusted one, right, like an official government server that you're supposed to interface with, then the person who controls that key server is going to essentially have the ability to control who publishes their keys there. And so who is able to be verified? And that's obviously a disturbing amount of control to give to a government or a corporation to essentially be able to cryptographically decide who is real and who is it. The technology to verify that messages are authentic already exist in its unadulterated open source form, and you should use these tools like PGP to verify signatures and sign and encrypt things yourself. But deep fakes are just one fancy new tool in the very large propaganda and social engineering toolbox, and cryptographic verifications probably won't do much to change the public's opinion about them.