The Authenticating Body and Deep Fakes
Remember when the internet used to be just text and maybe a couple of very slowly loading pictures? This is the internet at the centre of Sherry Turkle’s early works, The Second Self and Life on Screen, are full of chatrooms and MUDs which she argues provide a disembodied freedom to explore aspects of our selves beyond our bodies. The oft-grabbed quote of Life of Screen is, “You are who you pretend to be.” The internet was a largely anonymous space.
The internet as a disembodied place of digital exploration seems quaint now. The advent of social media, further facilitated by high-speed internet and smartphones has ushered in what I call ‘the embodied turn’. Bodies are now everywhere (and nowhere) online.
As such, the body links online self-presentation to a locatable offline person. The ability to link self-presentation to a body, a person and an offline existence means that the self online can be falsified against offline patterns of behaviour.
Arguably, this assumption was ushered in by Facebook. Unlike many other online environments including early social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook began with an emphasis on real names linked, and in effect verified by offline institutions. For the first few years of operation, Facebook users had to have a verifiable email at a university. This approach is radically different to the seemingly fluid and commitment-free modes of self-presentation that had previously dominated the internet.
Now we were all meant to be real names, linked to real bodies and the seemingly fluid online space began to solidify, becoming more tightly linked to ‘real’ life. As offline social networks were replicated online, the distinction between the two domains became meaningless.
The mainstreaming of online dating through apps like Tinder and Bumble which required access to your Facebook account to join in the first instance further cemented this link. With their emphasis on photos over text description, dating apps further centred representations of the (mediated) body as a central part of mundane digital practices.
The ordinariness of this has made the exceptions remarkable. Such exceptions (or deceptions) are the focus of continued cultural anxiety about authenticity online. This anxiety is spurred in part by the 2010 documentary Catfish and the resultant tv-series Catfish: The TV Show, now in its 8th season. The premise of Catfish hooks us because we have been habituated into expecting people to be who they said they were online, able to easily prove it with a selfie or a video call. Even Reddit one of the last bastions of anonymity online also enacts image-based verification practices. Celebrities engaging in AMA (ask me anything) sessions on its forums post photos of themselves holding a homemade sign with the date. Communication may be mediated, but it is authenticated by the absent presence of the body.
While the body is the authenticator of online communication we have come to accept, as with other aspects of day-to-day life that these representations are framed, crafted and curated. In a 2010 interview with the creators of Catfish, Gilbey explains, “Even those of us who have never ventured online can't claim to be innocent of false advertising; we have all exaggerated our plus-points, concealed our flaws, mis-sold ourselves in some way.”
We also understand that all media and our self-representations are framed, cropped and filtered in service of a larger narrative. Simulacra and simulation are mundane parts of daily life, while some argue that the manipulation of media is inherently untruthful, Baudrillard argues instead that “..The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
We have long passed the stage where representation is linked to the original, but the enmeshment of the body with digital technologies has lulled us into the sensation that online video and images are signifiers of something real.
How does this relate to deep fakes? Deep fakes unsettle the idea that there is a real object (a body) to which to connected the video.
The deep fake is a ‘never was’ uncoupling of the object and its representation. There is only representation.
Take this latest video from the Tom Cruise Deepfake TikTok account (I sentence I can’t believe I just typed).
The complete detachment of the object and image that deepfakes representation means that they are ripe for panic. Observers worry they could increase the spread of misinformation, and make propaganda harder to detect, they are representative of the slide of information online away from ‘the real’
The idea that sophisticated deepfakes exist also plays into the hands of conspiracy thinking. If deepfakes are as powerful and readily available and some panic they are, then no image or video is reliable, but other further serve as evidence of conspiracy. In some ways, this is an extension of the ‘body double’ rumours that have plagued both Hilary Clinton and Melania Trump. As we rely on bodies as authenticators in a culture saturated by mediation, we are trained to read these images for inconsistencies and incongruencies. Deviation from the expected creates a vortex of uncertainty. The creeping tide of panic around deepfakes will only make this more pronounced. Our techno-dystopian fears have been fuelled and stoked by the political and social turmoil of the last 7 years and these fears nudge up into a defensive, deterministic stance, “look at what social media has done!”. We fear bots, and coordinated campaigns, perhaps forgetting at times that there are bodies involved in these processes too, in initiating, reading, receiving and sharing. Bodies that are humans with fears, hopes and desires that we read information with and through. At the times technology seems to run on ahead of us, and deepfakes tap into that worry. In a swirling sea of misinformation maybe bodies also are imperceptibly slippery and changeable and fake. Our imaginations are already running away from us.
However, our techno-dystopian nightmares about deepfakes are worse than the technology itself. In an interview with The Verge, Chris Ume, the creator of the Tom Cruise deepfakes emphasises that “You can’t do it by just pressing a button.” Indeed, Ume is a VFX specialist, who has hired a Tom Cruise impersonator to mimic Cruise’s voice and mannerisms. Each clip takes “weeks of work” and requires the use of specialist software including a DeepFaceLab algorithm, traditional CGI and VFX. Each clip is further processed by Ume by hand, frame by frame, with the intention of removing glitches. Inserting even a vaguely credible deepfake into the political process would require weeks of specialist work and knowledge.
The idea of deepfakes is socially powerful, it plays on our fear of being gullible of our senses betraying us and a weightless born of the unmooring of representation and reality. While the unaltered body has never existed online, the development of the internet, particularly social media means that it has become a short-hand for authenticity.
(This post exists thanks to chats with Clare Southerton about weird things we found online that week)
(Authored by Naomi Smith)