Key Takeaways
- The US Defense Department’s Pentagon is planning to use AI to create deepfakes for social media and online content.
- The use of AI for deepfakes is a threat to national security and online security.
- The US government has previously called deepfakes a threat and has accused Russia, China, and Iran of using them to influence US elections.
Washington: The US Special Operations Command is seeking contractors to create deepfake internet users that are undetectable by humans and computers. According to The Intercept, this technology will be used to generate convincing online personas for social media platforms and other online content.
“”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 … [users must] appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” the news portal reported on Thursday, citing the command’s plan.
In particular, the command is interested in solving the problem of verifying users on social networks, so it is looking for technology that can create selfies and official documentation to bypass these checks, the report read. Special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” the report added.
However, these plans ran counter to the official position of the US government, since the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Security Agency have previously called deepfakes a threat. Washington also accused Russia, China and Iran of using deepfakes to allegedly influence the US elections.
