The Free

Deepfake democracy: How AI is disrupting the biggest election on Earth

from thefreeonline on 30 Apr, 2024 13:06 by Vikram Sharma, at Home India

Manipulated videos of political endorsements are too sophisticated to discern or track. Experts say the intent might be reverse psychology – to undermine the party the video endorses, once voters discover it is fake

Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha in his office in Kolkata, March 10, 2022. © Dibyangshu SARKAR / AFP

The ongoing Indian parliamentary elections, like those in the US, Pakistan, and Indonesia, are witnessing the creative use of artificial intelligence. Some AI-generated content, such as phone calls to voters apparently from candidates but actually by AI-generated voices, is harmless. Others, like deepfake videos of film stars ostensibly endorsing one party over another, or of the country’s home minister advocating for abolishing affirmative action, are more sinister.

TikTok account featuring a deepfake of Keanu Reeves

And India’s keystone cops are one step behind cyber-space’s ‘bad actors’, unable to discern deepfakes from real videos and unable to trace their origins, left with the sole recourse of blocking them – by which time it’s too late.

The term ‘deepfake’ derives from ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, and signifies the digital manipulation of media to substitute one person’s image with another’s.

Students camp at the University of Valencia to demand an end to relations with Israel

from thefreeonline on 30th April 2o24 by Ester Fayos at La Directa * translation thefreeonline

The student movement sets up a camp, for now indefinite, at the Faculty of Philosophy in solidarity with Palestine and to denounce the “genocide perpetrated by the colonial State of Israel in Gaza”.

The protest adds to the wave of pro-Palestinian mobilizations started in recent days at universities in the United States

Camping in solidarity with Palestine at the University of Valencia | file
Esther Fayos

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, April 29, and the first students with their tents are starting to arrive at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Valencia. Around thirty tents and eighty people fill the hall of the faculty when it is ten o’clock at night.

Through WhatsApp and Telegram groups, the call for a first assembly to organize what has been called “Solidarity camp with Palestine”, the first in Spain, has been shared.

They are students and teachers “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to contribute to the end of the genocide perpetrated by the colonial State of Israel in Gaza”.

This is how they present themselves in a manifesto sent to the media this Monday.

Onada repressiva a València contra l’activisme en solidaritat amb Palestina *Repressive wave in Valencia against activism in solidarity with Palestine Ester FayosImatges | Lucas Guerra

“This is the genocide best documented audiovisually by its victims and its perpetrators, the worst genocide we have experienced in our lifetime and the genocide that speaks worst of the North Atlantic, due to its complicity with the Israeli apartheid regime “, they receive.

For the time being, the camping at the Faculty of Philosophy remains “indefinite”.