I don't feel like the deepfakes are the fundamental problem. Honestly, I think they're a tiny symptom of a much more significant concern, and if we take care of that, foreign deepfakes will be irrelevant.

See, elections are an exercise in story telling. Multiple actors tell stories to multiple audiences and ask them to vote on which story resonates with them more. The biggest actors are the campaigns themselves, followed by allies like their parties, other politicians, thought leaders, the media, lobby groups, activists groups, and so on. And foreign actors are a part of that.

The problems presented in the article are really three things:

1. Foreigners are participating in presidential campaigns. No shit, of course they are. They have a stake in the outcome. Everyone with a stake participates, and that includes a ton of people we don't like, like fossil fuel companies a billionaires.

2. They're using deepfakes. This isn't clearly a major change from all the bullshit we already deal with. Remember why Bush convinced everyone Al Gore was a pathological liar who claimed that he personally invented the internet? Or that John McCain had a secret illegitimate black child? Utter bullshit. It sucks, but it's not new.

3. Finally, the most important part: campaigns have the ability and responsibility to simply tell a better story. If Biden loses, it's going to be because people thought he was a senile, ineffective, caretaker president with no agenda or vision whatsoever. Is that true? Not really. But if people think that, it's NOT because China is going to share a fake video of Biden acting senile. It's going to be because Biden didn't present himself in such a way to make a random unsourced video believable.

If any single messaging campaign can sway an election, it definitionally means that the campaign was less effective with all its money and staff and allies than a random nobody on twitter spreading nonsense. Which American nobodies already do anyway, regardless of whether the Ayatollah gets involved.

The problem is that our elections are vapid exercises in media manipulation rather than genuine exercises of participatory democracy, and the existing manipulators hate competition. The result isn't to limit competition, it's to focus on creating a free and fair democracy with a healthy media ecosystem.

It will take a profound cultural shift, to the point where most people use their critical thinking skills to check the veracity of outrageous deep fake media clips. Is that likely to happen? Not really. But even if we can just increase critical thinking abilities by 10% that would be progress.

As a side note, it seems like most politicians who are caught saying outrageous things will do one of two things: deny them vociferously, or proudly brag and confirm that yes, they said/did that. So maybe it won't be as hard to find the truth as we first think? Though that's probably just me being overly optimistic.

How do China and Iran benefit from the election of one candidate/party over the other?

Honestly from the outside it still looks 50/50 for this year. I'd bet that 2028 is likely to be much worse.

If I were you I'd get all the guns and tinned food you need now just in case you need them four years sooner than you think.

Fight fire with fire? Make an AI that's trained to recognize AI images? One for text? And probably soon one for video?

The box can't be shut once its opened. We either find a way or lose what is reality and what is fiction. At that point you might as well not engage with the internet.