The world feels sympathy for Trump, who says #MeToo when it comes to deepfakes.
In the wake of the deepfake crisis, Donald Trump is now claiming that every controversial comment that people have quoted him on has in fact been the work of deepfake fabricators.
Deepfakes are videos that feature realistic face-swaps, usually celebrities’ faces digitally stitched onto other bodies. More recently, however, this meme material has shifted to have more erotic motivations. “Deepfake” is now a trending search topic on popular porn sites, with fake sex tapes of celebrities, such as Gal Gadot and Emma Watson, garnering tens of thousands of views.
Like these women, Trump says that he too is a victim of deepfakes.
“The fake news media puts the Trump name on all these terrible things that I’ve never said and then they call me a liar when I deny them!” said President Donald Trump at a special White House Press Briefing last week. “You can’t trust their footage, folks. They’re all deepfakes.”
This revelation is stunning, considering how many times Trump has been “caught in a lie” by the press. The President pointed to a few different instances were his words were falsified.
“Like during my very successful campaign. People were saying that I made fun of that one disabled reporter. I never did that, and I told everyone that, and then they pull out this video of me mocking him during a speech, and everyone believes them!” Trump continued, “And it’s not just that! The thing about the ‘shithole countries,’ Mexico, even the pee tape!”
This has elicited sympathy from his colleagues and peers.
“I always thought that the Donald on the television and the one I met in person were vastly different people,” said former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton. “Now I know why. I’d really like to apologize to all the awful things I’ve said about him.”
“I don’t know why we didn’t catch this earlier,” said Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. “The facial expressions in those videos never looked very human.”
However, some experts in the field feel the need to silence yet another victim of abuse.
“It just doesn’t add up,” said Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel. “When I first heard about this, I consulted some of the programmers in charge of our app’s lenses and faceswap tech. They told me that tracking Trump’s face with the precision necessary to make it look realistic would be incredibly difficult, even for professionals. The AI we have right now just isn’t advanced enough.”
Despite this, the FBI is now halting the Russia probe to investigate which news networks had a part in creating these deepfakes.
“It doesn’t seem right to continue the investigation into the Trump campaign when it now looks like a great deal of it was faked,” said FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “We need to take a comprehensive look into what was real and what wasn’t if we are to proceed, and the only way to do that is to see which organizations or parties are guilty of deepfaking.”
With this deepfake issue only going to get worse in the future, President Trump offers this piece of advice: “If you see a video of me saying something outrageous, just don’t believe it. It’s fake news.”
