BENEATH THE FALLING SKY, NY – To me, the best part of any new or emerging entertainment-related technology isn’t the wondrous things we can do with it. It’s the guaranteed freak-out over the perils of the same technology we get to hear from people who are reflexively afraid of things which are new and different.

For instance, once upon a time, the fucking banjo was considered a vector of human ruin to the point we had preachers running around telling people things like: “You might as well give your son a ticket to hell as give him a five-string banjo.”

Well guess what, Pastor Buzzkill, 100 years have passed, and unless Bela Fleck is secretly Satan himself, culling the world of its mortal souls one painstakingly transposed Bach piece at a time, I think we can safely say the banjo hasn’t laid waste to humanity and isn’t about to do so in the future. (For the record, as potentially world-ending musical instrument-trends go, the recent resurgence of the ukulele strikes me as a far more promising candidate on that front.)

The latest entertainment-related technology to be singled out as a reason for full-blown panic is AI-assisted fake porn videos, which people have taken to calling “deepfakes” because that’s the screen name used by some putz on Reddit who has been credited with authoring the first round of almost-kinda-convincing fake celeb porn videos with the assistance of AI.

Leading the way in freaking the fuck out over deepfakes has been VICE Media, which has offered up such deepfake headline gems as “We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now” and “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked” and “AI-Moderators Fighting AI-Generated Porn Is the Harbinger of the Fake News Apocalypse.”

VICE’s latest deepfake freak-out piece (at least at the time of this post; I’m sure they’ll publish several more very soon) ups the ante by being rendered in panic-enhancing all-caps breathlessness: “GOOGLE WILL NOT SAVE US FROM THE COMING DELUGE OF DEEPFAKES — AND MELANIA TRUMP IS JUST THE START.”

OMG, even Google won’t save us from deepfakes? Whatever will we do – except, you know, possibly learn to suspend judgement on videos of questionable provenance until they’ve been more thoroughly examined to determined whether they’re legit?

The best part of this particular VICE freak-out piece about deepfakes is one of the author’s conclusions about what the rise of deepfakes suggests: “The porn industry has once again become an early adopter of new technology, and the videos will no doubt cause embarrassment to the victims However, the potential threat from deepfake videos goes far beyond porn.”

Really, VICE? The “porn industry” has thrown in behind deepfakes?

VICE’s own reporting doesn’t even begin to support this assertion. The closest I’ve seen to any porn company “adopting” AI-assisted video-making is one or two studios musing about the possibility and potential of doing so. Other than that, it has been all about individual miscreants doing it for their own amusement and that of their forum-haunting peers.

The last point the author makes in the line quoted above is fair enough, I suppose – there is some disturbing potential for deepfake videos to be used in framing people for crimes, or suggesting a politician has said or done something awful. But how is some jerkoff calling himself “RedKiller” making fake porn videos analogous to the porn industry’s role in the VHS vs. Beta adoption-war, or even HD DVD vs. Blu-ray one?

Granted, the porn industry’s role in the outcome of both VHS vs. Beta and HD DVD vs. Blu-ray is overstated habitually by the media to begin with, but I still like to think the “porn industry” can’t be equated to a few random shmucks using AI to alter existing porn videos.

As for the point deepfakes could become much more troublesome in the future, I understand the concern – but let’s save our rhetorical hyperventilating for when the technology is used to create a problematic fake which ISN’T immediately and easily identified as bogus, shall we?

In the meantime, if VICE could dial back on the sensationalism just a bit, and maybe refrain from putting someone like “f4kepr0nzMaker69” or “Phuckfugazi” or “MAGAMuffinStuffer” or whatever the next deepfake author calls himself into the same entertainment business-category as Larry Flynt, that would be much appreciated, too.

Panicking Man Image © Javier Zubiri