The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer

Before the start of India’s general election in April, a top candidate looking to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not out wooing voters on the campaign trail. He was in jail. Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi and the head of a political party known for its anti-corruption platform, was arrested in late March for, yes, alleged corruption. His supporters hit the streets in protest, decrying the arrest as a politically motivated move by Modi aimed at weakening a rival. (Kejriwal has maintained his innocence, and the Indian government has denied that politics played a role.)

Soon after the arrest, Kejriwal implored his supporters to stay strong. “There are some forces who are trying to weaken our country and its democracy,” he said in a posted to social media by a fellow party member. “We need to identify those forces and fight them.” It was not Kejriwal’s actual in which Kejriwal is strumming a guitar from inside a prison cell, singing a melancholic Hindi song. In classic AI fashion, there are mangled fingers and a pastiche of human faces.