 There seems to be a lot of concern about deep fake photos and videos going viral on the internet. The AI generated photos of Donald Trump being arrested and the fake lewd photos of Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl are just some of the more recent examples. Even though these photos might seem real at first there's a number of ways that you can try to identify a deep fake pretty easily. Usually the hands or the face give it away with some really uncanny features, jewelry and backgrounds especially when they are very intricate tend to trip up AI. In fact if you know what to look for I would say that identifying a deep fake is actually a lot easier than identifying a photoshop because with those photoshopped images or images that are edited in GIMP or any other program like that you got to zoom in usually and look around the edges for pixel mismatches and color mismatches or you got to look at shadows and differences in the lighting to see if something just isn't right but it's usually a lot harder to identify a photoshop than a deep fake plus with the current technology someone that's really skilled at photoshop or GIMP can create a specific kind of image a lot easier than I guess a prompt engineer could create a specific kind of deep fake but with every single big tech company investing in AI right now the technology this deep fake technology it's going to keep getting better and most people out there right now they don't know how to keep up with the new technology I mean they're still lagging behind not even able to verify who their emails are really coming from or how to verify just about anything digitally yet more and more of these people want to use social media and be online so we may soon get to a point where the majority of people that are online just don't know how to verify whether or not something they are looking at or reading or watching is real or AI generated a lot of people are concerned with deep fakes influencing elections in fact the White House has said that they want to come up with a way to cryptographically verify videos of Joe Biden so that viewers don't mistake them for all the deep fakes that are floating around out there and of course there's already been a campaign of robo calls going on for months now where it kind of sort of sounds like Joe Biden telling people that the midterms are just a bunch of malarkey and that they should save their vote for the primaries so how could the White House or really anybody go about cryptographically verifying their videos in order to fight against somebody creating a deep fake about them well asymmetric cryptography tools like PGP they honestly sound like a perfect candidate to me public private key pairs they have already been used for years to verify things like website certificates software packages communications and they make up the foundation of cryptocurrency right verifying these money transactions you can cryptographically sign any kind of file you know text files video photos you can create archives of a bunch of files and then you can sign that and then people can verify it with your public key but the real question is how many people are going to actually add the White House's public key into their key rings and then use it to verify pictures and videos of the president I mean how many people have these public key rings right like I said the tech to verify files with public private key pairs has been around for years now and if there ever was a time when the general public would have been using this technology the most to verify things or at least software I think that probably would have been in the 2000s and maybe early 2010s before most people were getting their software from official sources like the Microsoft store the Google Play store and the Apple store because back then the way most people got stuff was they would just go on to Google and they would type in you know download whatever name of the program they wanted and then hopefully they the results that they would get from Google would be the author of the software's website or possibly an official source forage link you know where the author posted the binary for them to download but looking back the amount of trojans and viruses that people were still downloading from websites tells me that people were not regularly verifying the software that they were downloading or even verifying that they were downloading it from the right website so these days with the official software repositories like Google Play store Apple store and so on these verifications that people would have theoretically done by themselves are now done by the companies who created these official repositories and the authors of the software they don't even bother posting keys for people to verify their software independently anymore at least most of the time they don't do this but I don't even think people's lack of familiarity with PGP is the biggest problem with deep fakes or the biggest problem with them going viral and being believed by the public because I think the real issue which probably can't be fixed with any kind of software or technology is the fact that people want to believe fake things are real okay whether it's deep fakes of Donald Trump getting arrested or you know again Taylor Swift getting freaky with the Kansas City fans right those fake photos the people who believe these images they either don't have a healthy amount of skepticism about what they see on the internet and they were probably the same kind of people that believe in stuff like ghost videos or I remember those pictures of giant skeletons that went viral on the internet years ago or when it comes to deep fakes that are being used for political propaganda specifically they honestly aren't even necessary right they're not necessary as a tool of propaganda because we've seen time and time again over the years whether it's Russian collusion conspiracies QAnon or coronavirus that people are going to latch onto these ridiculous political narratives that have little to no evidence to back them up and when you present evidence to these people that shows them that they're wrong they tend to become even more steadfast in their beliefs right this is just kind of a natural I guess condition of the human mind so cryptographic signatures are not going to do anything to dissuade those people and the White House should know this right I mean this is something that's again just in human nature that's been going on for years so what I would be more wary of here than the deep fakes themselves being used for propaganda is deep fakes being used as a scapegoat to implement a centralized method of cryptographic verifications I guess sort of like a PGP key server but in reality it would probably be something that's much more proprietary and more controlled and you know if that particular verification server becomes the only trusted one right like an official government server that you're supposed to interface with then the person who controls that key server is going to essentially have the ability to control who publishes their keys there and so who is able to be verified and that's obviously a disturbing amount of control to give to a government or a corporation to essentially be able to cryptographically decide who is real and who isn't the technology to verify that messages are authentic already exist in its unadulterated open source form and you should use these tools like PGP to verify signatures and sign and encrypt things yourself but deep fakes are just one fancy new tool in the very large propaganda and social engineering toolbox and cryptographic verifications probably won't do much to change the public's opinion about them