Cutting Edge Computing

On Deepfakes and Geography April 27, 2021

When I was in the sixth grade, my science teacher sat me down with a book of overlapping aerial images of terrain, and handed me a pair of stereoscopic glasses.  “I want you to draw topographical maps of these terrains,” he said.  I took to the task assiduously, and in a few weeks had over a dozen hand-drawn topographical maps of well-known terrains.  Of course, they were likely pretty inaccurate, as I was working with only my eyesight to add quantitative information to my estimates of depth and slope.

But they weren’t fake, by any means.  They were the product of careful observation of the photos, and drawing of the representations.  Now we have this thing called deepfakes, where we are able to display highly realistic geographical information and images that have been faked.

It turns out that people aren’t the only raw material for deepfakes.  Maps and satellite images can also be faked.  Your first thought may be “why?”  I know mine was.  But the more interesting question may well be who would bother to produce them?  Consider these scenarios:

Well, let’s say there is a secret military installation, somewhere in the mountains.  We can use deepfakes to hide it entirely in perfectly realistic images shown to the public or to adversaries.  Likewise, we can put a fake base somewhere and use its images for similar purposes.  Who is to know, unless they try to physically visit.

Let’s say we have a natural disaster, a destructive hurricane or earthquake.  For PR or political purposes, we may want to show far less damage than actually occurred.  Geographical deepfakes give us the ability to do so.

In both cases, governments can control access to the physical spaces and overhead airspace, so the images can reasonably be presented as ground truth.  Except that they’re not.  Instead, they are carefully crafted messages, communicating only what their creators want known.

These seem like relatively small transgressions in the grand scheme of things.  I’m not at all a conspiracy theorist, so I doubt that such activities can be carried out on a grand scale.  We can’t keep people out of, for example, Los Angeles if there is a major earthquake.

But geographical deepfakes take us one step closer into what people are calling the “post-truth” era.  There is the saying that “you are entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.”  Well, with deepfakes, perhaps you are, if you prepare and present them well enough.  To me, that is a frightening proposition.