Vice Premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) was accused of having an “illicit affair” a few months ago, after a video showing a man, who resembled Cheng, entering a hotel room with a woman was circulated online. In response, Cheng has said multiple times that the man in the video was not him, and he has asked his lawyer to file a defamation lawsuit to prove his innocence.
The Criminal Investigation Bureau, which was supposed to determine whether the video was generated by artificial intelligence (AI), said that the result was “inconclusive.”
The assessment was conducted using US and Netherlands-developed tools like Deepware and Sensity, with the former spotting no signs of deepfakes due to the video’s poor resolution, while the latter assigned it a 65 percent possibility of being a “deepfake” video. As the two programs did not show consistent results, the bureau could only declare the case “inconclusive.”
It has been reported that the two programs with equipment are priced at NT$20 million (US$637,471), and that it only takes half an hour to get results, which should mark it as the latest technology in the field of deepfakes. What is surprising is that even with the state-of-the-art technology, the police still have no way of obtaining conclusive results. This is remarkable, because not only did the investigation fail to prove Cheng’s innocence, it also assessed the video as having a 60 percent possibility of having been made with deepfake technology. What is even more perturbing is that if the video was faked, this case shows that the police do not have the technology to accurately detect deepfake content. This could be worrying if the technology falls into the wrong hands.
With the presidential election on Jan. 13 entering its final stages, the three presidential tickets are in a tight race, polls show.
If before the election someone spreads content that could damage the presidential candidates’ images and influence voters’ decisions, that could easily become a turning point.
Similar tricks have been tried in elections before. Two decades ago, someone leaked a fake audio tape to accuse then-Kaohsiung mayor Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) of having an affair during the Kaohsiung mayoral election, resulting in Wu losing to now Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷).
Compared with fake audio, deepfake videos bring a larger and more visual impact. Considering that we are in the digital age where videos could go viral in an instant, there could be no guarantee that such a trick would not take place the day before the election.
The Central Election Commission, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the National Communications Commission, the National Police Agency and other agencies, as well as the government and opposition parties and campaign teams, should collaborate to take precautions by formulating crisis management and response strategies so that the public does not panic and campaigns do not fall into disarray if such a thing happens. Such an event would not only put Taiwan’s democracy to shame, it would also sow the seeds of even greater discord.
Weber Lai is a professor in National Taiwan University of Arts’ department of radio and television.
Translated by Rita Wang
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