Back in 2019, I submitted my first ever thesis on a self-created Video Art and Installation piece on topic “Immortality- A Lie!”, as a degree requirement for Bachelors in Computer Arts at FJWU. Currently, I am doing MS in Media Studies from Riphah Institute of Media Sciences. As I entered RIMS, I was of the view that I’ve to conduct research on Video Art or something relevant to it. After countless meeting with Director RIMS, the topic that got finalized and upon which I’ll be conducting research is “Deepfake Videos as a Tool of Manipulation: A case study of the impact of deepfake videos on political communication in Pakistan”.
Deepfake (stemming from “deep learning” and “fake”) is a method that can superimpose face pictures of an objective individual to a video of a source individual to make a video of the objective individual doing or making statements the source individual does. Deepfake is intended to cause an incongruence between expectation and perceived reality. The reason for selecting this topic is that recent technological developments have made it easy to produce what are now called “deepfakes”, hyper-realistic videos by swapping faces that leave slight to immense traces of manipulation. This research will highlight Deepfakes’ potential to be used as a weapon which is alarmingly increasing and many harms can be anticipated based on people’s ability to create explicit content without others’ consent. It’s expected that people will use deepfakes to cyberbully, destroy reputations, blackmail, spread hate speech, incite violence, disrupt democratic processes, and spread disinformation to targeted audiences and to commit cybercrime and frauds.
The main objectives of this research will be to explore the potential of deep fake videos as persuasion of political objectives and to examine how deepfake videos are used in political communication in Pakistan.
Thankyou!
