These tools represent the latest weapons in the arsenal of fake news creators – ones far easier to use for the layman than those before. While the videos produced by these tools may not presently stand up to scrutiny by forensics experts, they are already good enough to fool a casual viewer and are only getting better. The end result is that creating a good-enough fake video is now a trivial matter.
There are, of course, more traditional ways of creating fake videos as well. The White House was caught using the oldest trick in the book while trying to justify the barring of a reporter from the briefing room: they sped up the video to make it look like the reporter was physically rough with a staff member.
Other traditional ways are misleadingly editing videos to leave out critical context (as in the Planned Parenthood controversy), or splicing video clips to map wrong answers to questions, etc. I expect that we will see an increase in these traditional fake videos before a further transition to the complete fabrications discussed above. Both represent a grave danger to the pursuit of truth.
Major platforms are acutely aware of the issues. Twitter has recently introduced a fact checking feature to label maliciously edited videos in its timeline. YouTube has put disclaimers about the nature of news organizations below their videos (for example, whether it is a government sponsored news organization or not). Facebook has certified fact checkers who may label viral stories as misleading.
However, these approaches rely on manual verification and by the time a story catches the attention of a fact checker, it has already been seen by millions. YouTube’s approach is particularly lacking since it doesn’t say anything about an individual video at all, only about the source of funding of a very small set of channels.
Now, forensically detecting forgeries in videos is a deeply researched field with work dating back decades. There are many artefacts that are left behind when someone edits a video: the compression looks weird, the shadows may jump in odd patterns, the shapes of objects might get distorted.