Rethinking Deepfakes: Historical Parallels and Institutional Solutions

The Blurry Line of Audiovisual Media

• 💡 The distinction between evidence and expression in audiovisual media has always been blurry, requiring secondary context for understanding.
• 📌 Historically, the advent of photography and audio recordings was quickly followed by fakery, with early images and recordings often staged or manipulated.
• 🔍 Society broadly accepted audiovisual media as evidence only well into the 1900s, highlighting a long-standing ambiguity.

Deepfakes and Historical Analogies

• 🎭 The paper "Pyrite or Panic" uses the analogy of fool's gold (pyrite) to explain that the existence of deepfakes, like pyrite, doesn't necessarily devalue the real thing (gold) but rather emphasizes the processes of validation.
• 📈 The value of gold is a social construct, much like knowledge, which relies on social and institutional processes such as academic institutions, journalism, and archival practices, rather than purely technological advancements.
• 🏛️ Historical parallels with technologies like photography and the telephone show that initial fears about their epistemological impacts often overlooked their primary use in amusement and entertainment.

Context and Election Deepfakes

• 🌐 By 2015, the media landscape was already fractured, with eroding trust in institutions and rising concerns about disinformation, creating a vulnerable societal context for the rise of deepfakes.
• 🗳️ Despite significant hype, deepfakes did not play a major role in election interference in 2024; isolated incidents were often used as jokes or political cartoons rather than for broad deception.
• 🎭 The actual use of fake content often leans towards artistic expression like memes and political cartoons, aiming to