Podcast
Root Causes 360: Joe Biden Deepfake Plays in New Hampshire Primary


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
February 6, 2024
A deepfake of Joe Biden's voice made an appearance in robocalls leading up to the New Hampshire primary. We discuss this latest development and its implications.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
And so, you know, of course, Biden didn't record this. And this didn't - - I mean, that primary wasn't close, right? So this robocall didn't affect the outcome of that primary in any meaningful way. But lots of races are close. And we all know this, right? There have been lots of races that have been extremely close, especially in the last 30 years. And so it's easy to imagine how tools - I don’t know if we want to use the word tools - techniques like this could actually swing a race.
So if you see a picture of a celebrity doing something bad, maybe you don't really entirely trust it. But most people haven't made the intellectual leap to apply that same idea to audio or video, but it can happen there, too. And again, this is a good example of that, where, you know, if people pick up the phone, and they get a robocall, and it sounds like a recorded message from Joe Biden, they don't think Joe Biden is calling them they know it's a recording, but they probably are prepared to make the intellectual leap to believe that this is a sanctioned message that Joe Biden is really behind. Right?
Because they'll say, oh, he recorded it, he must believe it. And, you know, this is the new normal. Like all of the world and all of the public, and all of our mechanisms and our laws, and our elections are going to have to reconsider and re-reckon with how we can, you know, think about these digital files, that again, we refer to as photographs or videos or audio recordings, which very well may not be those things.

