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Alex Lo

The United States has been stepping up efforts against “agents of chaos” from Iran, Russia, North Korea and China using AI-driven programmes on social media to spread disinformation and sow discord, including influencing elections.
In September, in an election-related press briefing held jointly by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials warned “deepfakes” had become a “malign influence accelerant”.
Last year, a joint statement from the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said: “Synthetic media, such as deepfakes, present a growing challenge for all users of modern technology and communications.”
Its global proliferation, they claimed, had presented opportunities for malicious actors to use the technology to target US interests.
The Pentagon has a programme partnering with the private sector to develop deepfake detection software to counter such online warfare from America’s adversaries.
So far, so good.
And then, a document listing new offensive capabilities that the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, aims to develop came to light.
One such programme is the creation of deepfakes technology that far exceeds current levels to make them virtually indistinguishable from real people. Alan Turing, the AI pioneer after whom the Turing test was named, would be very proud.
“Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content. The solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” the document says.
The rest of the section contains detailed technical specifications required to achieve the effects in 2D and 3D.
Perhaps no one should be surprised other than the obvious hypocrisy.
Those who have been tracking the Pentagon’s cyber and information warfare, as well as those waged by other US security agencies, will know it’s just par for the course.
Consider the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorisation Act of 2023”. The bill, which has been passed by the House of Representatives and is now before the Senate, aims to spend US$1.6 billion over five years to counter China propaganda – with American truths?
Earlier this year, after a media expose, the Pentagon admitted to having carried out a clandestine disinformation campaign to sow doubts about China’s Covid-19 vaccines in the Philippines and elsewhere at the height of the global pandemic.
The anti-vaccine operation, carried out in 2020 and 2021, was part of an overall information warfare against China. It targeted not only the Philippines but also Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia and the Middle East.
The disinformation spread from hundreds of compromised social media accounts. Besides accusing the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine as being unsafe and ineffective, it falsely claimed it contained pork gelatin, so its consumption or injection was presumably prohibited under Islam. Sinovac was approved by the World Health Organization.
In 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) took part in a joint investigation that uncovered “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia”.
“The platforms’ data sets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation. These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran,” the SIO report says.
The scale and length of the disinformation campaign over five years easily dwarfed those influence operations the US has accused others of committing.
The joint SIO report continues: “We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO [influence operations] on social media to be reviewed and analysed by open-source researchers to date. With few exceptions, the study of modern IO has overwhelmingly focused on activity linked to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China, and Iran.”
Neither the investigators nor the social media platforms identified who was behind the operations, which they said originated from the US and Britain.
It’s a bit like fighting terrorism with counterterrorism, which is often indistinguishable from terrorism; just ask the Israelis.
You fight lies and deception with better and bigger lies and deception. America, way to go!


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United States

How Pentagon will fight ‘deepfakes’ – with even deeper fakes

A new generation of AI-generated personas, to be virtually indistinguishable from real people, will be weaponised for information warfare. Photo: Shutterstock

South Korea to criminalise watching or possessing sexually explicit deepfakes

Activists rally against deepfake sex crimes. Photo: AFP

Activists in Seoul rally against illegal deepfake content calling for the government to enact appropriate countermeasures. Photo: AP

Singapore seeks to fight deepfakes in elections with new laws ahead of 2025 polls

Singapore plans to combat deepfakes in elections. Photo: Shutterstock

Singapore plans to combat deepfakes in elections with new legislation, allowing candidates to flag manipulated media, aiming to maintain public trust. Photo: Shutterstock

Janil Puthucheary, Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information. Photo: LightRocket via Getty Images

Singapore plans to combat deepfakes in elections, allowing candidates to flag manipulated media. Photo: Shutterstock

Singapore jails man who created deepfake porn of wife’s niece

The man set up a camera in the victim’s bathroom and hid one under her bed, the court heard. Photo: Shutterstock

The offender and his wife began arguing frequently and had marital issues, the court heard. Photo: Shutterstock

The offender bought equipment that allowed his recordings to be viewed and downloaded on a smartphone. Photo: Shutterstock

Opinion

A new generation of AI-generated personas, to be virtually indistinguishable from real people, will be weaponised for information warfare


A new generation of AI-generated personas, to be virtually indistinguishable from real people, will be weaponised for information warfare.


My Take

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

My Take | How Pentagon will fight ‘deepfakes’ – with even deeper fakes

A new generation of AI-generated personas, to be virtually indistinguishable from real people, will be weaponised for information warfare