Joe: A recent poll found that 44% of Republican voters believe the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is plotting to use a COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips into billions of people. Lewis: Wow. That’s… a lot of people. And it’s not just a fringe theory, it’s a mainstream belief. What happens when you can show them a fake video of him admitting it? Joe: That's the terrifying world Nina Schick maps out in her book, Deepfakes and the Infocalypse. And Schick isn't just a journalist; she's worked as a political advisor, so she's seen firsthand how this tech intersects with power. She wrote this book as an urgent warning, popularizing the term 'Infocalypse' to describe this crisis of truth we're all living through. Lewis: So she’s an insider sounding the alarm. That gives it some serious weight. It’s not just academic theory; it’s a warning from the front lines. Joe: Exactly. And to understand the Infocalypse, we have to start with probably the most famous deepfake ever made.

Lewis: I think I know the one you’re talking about. Is it the one with President Obama? Joe: That’s the one. It went viral a few years ago. You see what looks like an older, more weary Barack Obama, sitting in the Oval Office, looking straight at the camera. The title is something clickbaity, like 'You Won’t Believe What Obama Says In This Video!' Lewis: Right, and he starts talking about how enemies can make it seem like anyone is saying anything. It feels very presidential, very serious. Joe: Precisely. And then he drops the bombshell. He says something like, he would never publicly call President Trump a "total and complete dipshit." And for a split second, your brain just short-circuits. Did he really say that? It looks like him, it sounds like him… Lewis: Whoa, so it was a PSA? For a second there… I remember seeing it and my jaw just dropped. The reveal is that it’s actually the comedian and director Jordan Peele doing the voice, and his face is digitally mapped onto Obama’s. Joe: And that’s the gut punch. The video ends with the fake Obama delivering a chilling warning. He says, "Moving forward we need to be more vigilant with what we trust on the Internet... how we move forward in the Age of Information is going to be the difference between whether we survive or if we become some fucked-up dystopia." Lewis: That last line hits hard. It takes it from a clever tech demo to something genuinely frightening. What exactly is the 'Infocalypse' then? Is it just about deepfakes, or is it something bigger? Joe: It’s much bigger. Schick defines the Infocalypse as this polluted, dangerous, and untrustworthy information environment we’re all swimming in now. It’s fueled by two things: disinformation, which is intentionally spreading lies with malicious intent, and misinformation, which is just sharing bad information without meaning to. Deepfakes are just the newest, most powerful weapon in that environment. Lewis: So it’s the whole ecosystem that’s broken. It’s not just one fake video. Joe: Exactly. Think about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014. The evidence was overwhelming that a Russian military missile was responsible. But Russia launched this massive, multi-channel propaganda campaign to deny it. They flooded social media, state-sponsored news, and every available channel with dozens of conflicting, bizarre theories. Lewis: I remember that. There were stories that it was a Ukrainian fighter jet, or a bomb on board, or that the plane was already filled with dead bodies. Just chaos. Joe: Pure chaos. And that was the goal. The editor-in-chief of RT, the Russian state network, even said they were "conducting the information war" against the West. The point wasn't to make you believe one specific lie. The point was to create so much noise and confusion that you can't form a reasonable consensus on reality itself. You just throw your hands up and say, "Who knows what the truth is?" Lewis: And that’s the Infocalypse. It’s when we lose the ability to agree on basic facts. It’s why family dinners get so tense over politics—we can't even agree on the basic story anymore. We’re all living in different realities, curated by different feeds. Joe: That’s the perfect way to put it. And this erosion of shared reality is what makes us so vulnerable. It’s a structural problem. And while states like Russia are exploiting it, the tools to create this chaos are becoming available to everyone.

Lewis: Okay, so faking things isn't new. I mean, we've all seen those old photos with people edited out. What's different now? Joe: The difference is scale, speed, and access. Schick gives this incredible historical context. Think of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purges in the 1930s. When he had a political rival executed, he didn't just eliminate the person; he eliminated them from history. Lewis: You mean from the photographs? Joe: Every single one. There was an entire cottage industry of artisans who would meticulously scratch out faces from photo negatives, airbrush people out of official portraits, and recompose group shots. It was a painstaking, manual, state-controlled process. If you were an enemy of the state, you became an unperson. You were literally erased. Lewis: That’s chilling. It required the full power of a totalitarian regime to pull that off. Joe: Exactly. Now, fast forward to 2019. Martin Scorsese releases his film The Irishman. He spent a fortune from Netflix on cutting-edge CGI to de-age his legendary actors—Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci. The results were… okay. A little uncanny valley, a bit rubbery. Lewis: I remember the criticism. They looked younger, but their bodies still moved like old men. It was a bit weird. Joe: Well, a few weeks after the film came out, an anonymous YouTuber going by the name 'iFake' posted a clip on their channel. They took scenes from the movie and, using free, publicly available AI software, did their own de-aging. And Lewis, it was spectacularly better. Lewis: Hold on. A random person on the internet with free tools beat Hollywood's best and a multi-million dollar budget? How is that even possible? Joe: It’s possible because of a breakthrough in AI called Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. Schick explains it beautifully. Imagine you have two AIs locked in a duel. One is a master forger, trying to create a perfect fake image. The other is a master detective, trained to spot any imperfection in the forgery. Lewis: Okay, I’m with you. A forger and a detective. Joe: The forger creates a fake, the detective analyzes it and says, "Nope, the lighting on the left eye is wrong." The forger takes that feedback, tries again, and makes a slightly better fake. The detective says, "Better, but the shadow under the nose is off." They go back and forth, thousands, millions of times, each one getting exponentially better at its job. The forger gets better at faking, and the detective gets better at detecting. Lewis: And the end result of that battle is a forgery so perfect that even the best detective can't spot it. Joe: You got it. That’s the engine behind deepfakes. And that technology, which used to be the domain of PhDs at Google, is now open-source. It’s on platforms like GitHub for anyone to download and use. The power that once belonged exclusively to a totalitarian state like Stalin's is now in the hands of any teenager with a decent gaming PC. That is the democratization of deception. Lewis: And of course, the first thing people did with this incredible, world-changing power was… make fake porn. Joe: Sadly, yes. The term 'deepfake' was coined on Reddit in 2017 by a user who was using this AI to swap the faces of celebrities, like Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot, onto the bodies of pornographic actresses. It was vile, non-consensual, and it spread like wildfire. Lewis: That’s horrifying. And I read that the book cites some pretty grim statistics on this. Joe: It does. A 2019 report by the company DeepTrace found that of the nearly 15,000 deepfake videos online at the time, a staggering 96% of them were non-consensual pornography. It’s become a new, terrifying weapon for harassment and abuse, disproportionately targeting women. The actress Scarlett Johansson herself spoke out, saying how powerless she felt, because even if you get one site to take a video down, it just pops up on another server in a different country. Lewis: It’s a nightmare. So this power has been democratized, but it’s being used for the darkest possible purposes. And if individuals are doing this, what happens when governments get their hands on this level of technology? Joe: That's where we go from personal nightmares to geopolitical crises.

Joe: Russia has been playing this game for decades. Schick details a classic example from the Cold War called "Operation Infektion." In the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis was creating global panic, the KGB decided to weaponize that fear. Lewis: What did they do? Joe: They planted a story. In 1983, a small, pro-Soviet newspaper in India published an anonymous letter from a "well-known American scientist" claiming that the AIDS virus was secretly manufactured by the U.S. military at Fort Detrick as a biological weapon. Lewis: That’s a huge accusation. But it’s in a small Indian newspaper. How does that spread? Joe: Slowly, at first. But the KGB was patient. They kept pushing the narrative through their global network of friendly journalists and publications. A few years later, an East German scientist published a bogus "scientific" report backing the claim. By the late 80s, that single lie had appeared in media in over 80 countries. It was a slow-burning, analog virus of an idea. Lewis: And I bet it found fertile ground in communities that already distrusted the U.S. government. Joe: Absolutely. It was particularly effective in the African-American community, given the horrific history of things like the Tuskegee experiment. To this day, polls show a significant percentage of the community believes the AIDS virus was man-made in a government lab. A lie planted 40 years ago is still doing damage. Lewis: So it's the same playbook, just supercharged by technology now. What took years for the AIDS lie to spread can now happen in an afternoon. Joe: And it’s not just foreign adversaries anymore. The threat is domestic. Schick points to the incident in 2018 with CNN journalist Jim Acosta. After a tense exchange with President Trump at a press conference, the White House suspended his press pass. Lewis: I remember this. They claimed he "put his hands on" a young female intern who was trying to take the microphone from him. Joe: Right. But the video of the exchange clearly showed he just lowered his arm to shield the mic. But then, a doctored video started circulating, originating from the far-right site InfoWars. This version was subtly sped up to make Acosta's motion look like an aggressive chop. And the White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders, shared that manipulated video from her official Twitter account to justify banning a journalist. Lewis: That’s insane. The White House using a doctored video—a 'cheapfake' as Schick calls them—as official evidence. It’s one thing for Russia to do it, but when it's coming from inside the house… Joe: That’s the point. The Infocalypse isn't something being done to the West. It's something the West is now doing to itself. Political leaders are actively participating in corroding the information environment. They’re exploiting what’s called the 'liar's dividend.' Lewis: The liar’s dividend? What’s that? Joe: It’s the flip side of deepfakes. When everyone knows that convincing fakes exist, a liar can dismiss any real evidence against them as a deepfake. Imagine a politician is caught on a real video taking a bribe. Their defense? "That's not me. It's a sophisticated deepfake created by my political enemies." Lewis: It’s a 'get out of jail free' card for reality. It makes accountability impossible. If you can just deny anything you don't like, then truth has no power. Joe: And that’s the endgame of the Infocalypse. A world where, as one KGB defector put it, people are so overwhelmed with information that "no-one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country." Lewis: This all feels so overwhelming. The book has a pretty bleak title. Does Schick offer any way out of this mess? Is there any hope?

Joe: There is, but it’s not a simple tech fix. Schick’s core message is that you can't fight the Infocalypse with just a better algorithm. The solution has to be human. She points to the tiny country of Estonia as a model. Lewis: Estonia? What did they do? Joe: In 2007, they were hit by a massive, coordinated cyber-attack from Russia after they moved a Soviet-era war memorial. Their government websites, banks, and media were all knocked offline. It was a wake-up call. They realized they were on the front line of a new kind of warfare. Lewis: So they built up their firewalls and digital defenses? Joe: They did that, yes. They have one of the most sophisticated digital societies in the world now. But they also did something more profound. They implemented a national strategy of "psychological defense." Lewis: Psychological defense? That sounds like something out of a spy novel. Joe: It’s about making society itself resilient to disinformation. It starts in schools, teaching kids media literacy and critical thinking from a young age. It involves the government being radically transparent to build trust. And it involves citizen-led initiatives, like a group of volunteers called the "Baltic Elves" who actively track and debunk Russian propaganda online. Lewis: So they vaccinated their whole society against lies. They decided that the best defense was an educated and engaged population that can't be easily fooled. Joe: Exactly. As one Estonian CEO put it, "You can fool some people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time." Their strategy is to make their people incredibly difficult to fool. Lewis: So the answer isn't a magic 'fake detector' app. It's about rebuilding our collective immune system to disinformation. It’s about education, critical thinking, and a shared commitment to valuing the truth. Joe: That's the core of it. We have to get outside the rip tide of the Infocalypse, as Schick says, rather than getting swept away by it. We have to focus on strengthening the foundations of our own information ecosystem. Lewis: It makes you wonder, what's the one piece of 'fake news' or a misleading video you almost fell for? And what was the little alarm bell in your head that made you second-guess it? Joe: That's a question we should all be asking ourselves. That little moment of doubt is where the fight begins. Lewis: This is Aibrary, signing off.