Conjecturing Fearful Futures: Journalistic Discourses on Deepfakes

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates journalistic discourses on “deepfakes” as the future of fake news. We analyze journalistic discourses on deepfakes over an 18-month period from 1 January 2018, when a GoogleTrends search demonstrates that the term first began to circulate, to 1 July 2019, shortly after an altered video of Nancy Pelosi, the US Speaker of the House, circulated on social media. Based on a comprehensive thematic analysis of English-language news stories on the topic, drawn from Nexis UK, we suggest that journalistic responses to deepfakes reveal deeper anxieties both about the future of the information environment and journalism’s role within this environment. Concerns that the audiovisual nature of deepfakes makes them inherently more believable than previous fake news forms leads to worries over the impending weaponization of deepfakes by resource-rich “bad actors.” At stake is the trustworthiness of media content, and journalists’ role in providing verified content to the public. We argue that journalists conjure up speculative worst-case scenarios around deepfakes—what we refer to as “conjectured specifity” to highlight the vital importance of journalism as a bulwark against fabrication and a defender of truth.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• deepfakes
• fake news
• journalistic authority
• misinformation
• trust in journalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that there is a growing literature in computer science on automated detection of deepfakes, suggesting that there are systematic ways of determining whether audio-visual material is “authentic” or “fabricated” (e.g., Mirsky and Lee 2021)

2 We arrived at this search strategy after several rounds of piloting search terms and occurrences, following the recommendations of Tamul and Martinez-Carillo (2018).

3 Most stories in this category were highly technical accounts, often from technology-focused websites and magazines, of how deepfakes are manufactured. As such, they did not engage substantively with the social and political implications of deepfakes.