The most effective fakes have been the simplest. Vaccines cause autism, Obama isn’t American, the election was stolen, climate change is a myth—these fictions are almost entirely verbal. They are too large to rely on records, and they have proved nearly impervious to evidence. When it comes to “deep stories,” as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls them, facts are almost irrelevant. We accept them because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we’ve seen convincing video.
This is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for fairies. He’d long been interested in the supernatural, but the First World War—during which his son and brother-in-law died—pushed him over the edge. Unwilling to believe that the dead were truly gone, he decided that an invisible world existed; he then found counterevidence easy to bat away. Were the fairies in the photographs not catching the light in a plausible way? That’s because fairies are made of ectoplasm, he offered, which has a “faint luminosity of its own.” But why don’t the shots of them dancing show any motion blur? Because fairies dance slowly, of course. If Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales describe a detective who, from a few stray facts, sees through baffling mysteries, his “Coming of the Fairies” tells the story of a man who, with all the facts in the world, cannot see what is right in front of his face.
Where deep stories are concerned, what’s right in front of our faces may not matter. Hundreds of hours of highly explicit footage have done little to change our opinions of the celebrities targeted by deepfakes. Yet a mere string of words, a libel that satisfies an urge to sexually humiliate politically ambitious women, has stuck in people’s heads through time: Catherine the Great had sex with a horse.
If by “deepfakes” we mean realistic videos produced using artificial intelligence that actually deceive people, then they barely exist. The fakes aren’t deep, and the deeps aren’t fake. In worrying about deepfakes’ potential to supercharge political lies and to unleash the infocalypse, moreover, we appear to be miscategorizing them. A.I.-generated videos are not, in general, operating in our media as counterfeited evidence. Their role better resembles that of cartoons, especially smutty ones.
Manipulated media is far from harmless, but its harms have not been epistemic. Rather, they’ve been demagogic, giving voice to what the historian Sam Lebovic calls “the politics of outrageous expression.” At their best, fakes—gifs, memes, and the like—condense complex thoughts into clarifying, rousing images. But, at their worst, they amplify our views rather than complicate them, facilitate the harassment of women, and help turn politics into a blood sport won by insulting one’s opponent in an entertaining way.