Despite several alarming headlines in the press last year like “Deepfakes are coming for American Democracy” (Hwang and Watts 2020), the sophisticated, artificial intelligence- (AI-) generated images and videos called “deepfakes” didn’t end up influencing the presidential election (Simonite 2020), and they haven’t yet shaped major world events. Rather, as with the case of the viral video that appeared to show Joe Biden wearing a wire on the presidential debate stage (it was a shirt crease), cruder manipulations and simple misrepresentations can be far more effective and influential.
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