Deepfakes, Fake Barns, and Knowledge from Videos

Abstract

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence on RTVE: Verification of fake videos and Deep fakes, content generation, and new professional profiles

“…In the Table 1 (see Annex) we summarize the similarities and differences between fake videos and deepfakes (Sohrawardi et al, 2019;Shilma et al, 2023;Haseena et al, 2023;Matthews, 2023).…”

The politics of past and future: synthetic media, showing, and telling

“…Drawing on the notion of informativity familiar from Skyrms [2010], Fallis [2021] argues that, in a deepfake-rich environment, videography actually carries less information. And Matthews [2023] argues that, in an environment rich with deepfakes, a veridical video is analogous to a real barn in Goldman's [1976] false barn country, so beliefs based on it are too lucky to count as knowledge. It seems, indeed, that the many strands of analytic epistemology converge at the conclusion that deepfakes degrade the role that videography will or should play in the formation of belief, generating what Habgood-Coote [2023] has recently termed the "Epistemic Apocalypse narrative" of deepfake technology.…”