Putin expected to use realistic fake video in 2020 election cycle

Washington Times:

U.S. leaders say Vladimir Putin used a familiar cyber playbook to “muck around” in the midterm elections last month, but intelligence officials and key lawmakers believe a much more sinister, potentially devastating threat lies just down the road — one that represents an attack on reality itself.

Policy insiders and senators of both parties believe the Russian president or other actors hostile to the U.S. will rely on “deep fakes” to throw the 2020 presidential election cycle into chaos, taking their campaign to influence American voters and destabilize society to a new level.

The eerie process, which relies on cutting-edge, deep-learning algorithm technology, produces high-quality audio and video of individuals saying things they never said or doing things they never did. The phony video, analysts say, will be virtually indistinguishable from real footage, mimicking voices, speaking patterns, facial expressions and surroundings to a frighteningly realistic degree.

U.S. officials attending a high-level national security forum last week say the technology is the next major threat to American elections and potentially to democracy itself, and analysts say the nefarious possibilities are virtually endless.

U.S. military researchers see deep fakes as a top priority, and lawmakers say cooperation among the armed forces, technology sector and Congress will be necessary to counter them.

“We are heading to an era where deep fakes technology is going to cause real chaos,” Sen. Ben Sasse, Nebraska Republican, told a room full of military, intelligence and national security officials Friday during the annual Texas National Security Forum.

“It’s going to destroy human lives, it’s going to roil financial markets, and it might well spur military conflicts around the world,” said Mr. Sasse, echoing what military and intelligence officials say privately. “When deep fakes technology produces audio or video of a global leader saying something or ordering some attack that didn’t happen. You’re going to have to actually have flesh-and-blood humans who have a little bit of a reservoir of public trust who can step to a camera together and say, ‘I know that looked really real on your TV screen. But it wasn’t real.”
...

I think they would have to start with real video to create the fakes.  It will make keeping archives of candidates statements all the more important to refute the fakes.  The technology is probably similar to the "bad lip syncing" videos used for comic effect in the past.