Like it would be necessary...
DOJ fears AI tampering with Biden-Hur audio
Story by Jordain Carney
• 9h • 3 min read
It's the latest step in a multi-pronged legal battle aimed at forcing the Justice Department to release the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur, pictured above.© Francis Chung/POLITICO
The Justice Department is seizing on an increasingly common fear as it fights to prevent the release of the audio of President Joe Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur: It could spawn deepfakes.
The concern — raised as part of an overnight
court filing late Friday — is the latest step in a
multi-pronged legal battle aimed at forcing the Justice Department to release the audio, which Biden claimed executive privilege over last month.
“The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files. If the audio recording is released here, it is easy to foresee that it could be improperly altered, and that the altered file could be passed off as an authentic recording and widely distributed,” the department wrote in a 49-page filing.
Beyond creating AI-generated deepfakes, Bradley Weinsheimer, an associate deputy attorney general at DOJ,
argued in an affidavit included in the filing on Friday night that releasing the audio would create a “substantial risk that malicious actors could alter the recording to (for example) insert words that President Biden did not say or delete words that he did say.”
Weinsheimer added that while it's already possible to create a deepfake of Biden’s voice, DOJ believes that releasing the audio would “make it far more likely that malicious actors could pass off a deepfake as the authentic recording,” while if the audio wasn’t released “the department or others would be much better able to establish the illegitimacy of any malicious deepfake.”