I wouldn’t be so confident about intelligent and informed people. They too get duped by propaganda. When we are dealing with entirely realistic-looking videos and photos, and we have spent our whole lives being trained to trust photo and video evidence, it’s going to be hard not to fall for some of this disinformation.
Some recent examples of AI deepfakes include:
— A video of Moldova’s pro-Western president throwing her support behind a political party friendly to Russia.
— Audio clips of Slovakia’s liberal party leader discussing vote rigging and raising the price of beer.
— A video of an opposition lawmaker in Bangladesh — a conservative Muslim majority nation — wearing a bikini.
I wouldn’t trust myself never to fall for any of that just on the basis of “intelligence”, and I’m only partly dumb. It requires us to retrain a lifetime of habitual trust in recorded evidence.