The Democrats and their media allies now have a new shtick. If they find a video to be embarrassing, especially videos revealing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they now pretend they are really “deepfakes” and “cheap fakes.”
On the CNBC afternoon show The Exchange on Monday, anchor Kelly Evans previewed a segment with current CNBC contributor and former Democrat Senator Heidi Heitkamp: “The rise of AI-generated deepfakes is on the rise ahead of this November’s election. Is it too late for Congress to regulate the industry?”
Evans put on screen the video revealing Joe Biden turning around and wandering a few steps away during a skydiving exhibition at the G-7 meeting in Italy. Watch the two versions of the video in which the CNBC host and contributor desperately want you to believe the first is a mere AI fake despite the fact that the second video shot at a different angle also shows Biden wandering away from the rest of the group.
KELLY EVANS: Senator Heitkamp, let’s show the first video of President Biden from the G7 summit recently that was making the rounds, and then we can show the actual video of President Biden in that same moment. Here’s the first one where it appears to show him kind of wandering off, as you can see, generating tons of headlines and reaction to what exactly had happened in this moment. There’s the Italian leader trying to bring him back. Then we can also show the video of what that looked like in real time.
Here’s the actual video where you see it from a different angle, kind of what was going on, a little bit more context around the situation and so forth. I guess my question would be, you know, where does this fall if we are so concerned about deep fakes and yet just simple editing or different views of the same kind of material, Senator, can also result in confusion?
HEIDI HEITKAMP: Absolutely. The technology has been there to use slow motion, to try and use other kinds of technologies other than AI. The thing about that video is it was first alt — not altered, but the dimensions was changed by the RNC, was picked up by the New York Post, it was spread broadly around, I think at one point I think 3 million hits. Guess what? They have reputational risk and that shouldn’t have happened. You know, when you hear the explanation of what President Biden was doing, it makes perfect sense that he was watching something off in the distance, but it makes it look like he was staring at nothing.
So, you know, I call on the DNC, the RNC and all the legitimate political organizations to stop it. I mean, if you want to play a video, play a video, but make sure that it hasn’t been altered. The problem with AI is that it is so intuitive and most people can use it, and so it can really fall in the hands of a lot of nefarious actors, people who don’t have reputational risk, that we can’t call to the carpet, especially foreign actors who may have a stake in this outcome. And so this, I think, it goes back to common sense. You will not have an easy way to figure out whether this is real or not. I always tell people, if somebody wants you to look at this and say, ‘Isn’t this horrible?’ you should automatically think, ‘You know, maybe that didn’t happen. Maybe I need to find out if that’s actually what happened and what the voices actually said.
“Maybe that didn’t happen”? This happened, regardless of the camera angle.
So what they call the “real video” showed exactly the same scene but at a different angle from what Evans and Heitkamp are suggesting was an AI fake video in the first clip presented. It’s not just that Biden turns around, but that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni moved quite quickly in both videos to retrieve the wandering Biden.
It’s hard to believe that Evans and Heitkamp think the viewers could be fooled by their explanation but their extreme gaslighting does reveal the level of their desperation to salvage Biden. Meanwhile they should understand why their CNBC audience are laughing at their attempts to pull off that AI fake excuse based on the laughable “proof” of different camera angles that still reveal the same event took place. Sorry, but normal people correctly scoff at the absurd notion that if a scene is recorded at different angles then that means one of the recordings has been somehow “faked” or “altered.”