“Of course they’re fake videos, everyone can see they're not real. All the same, they really did say those things, didn't they?” These are the words of Vivienne Rook, the fictional politician played by Emma Thompson in the brilliant dystopian BBC TV drama Years and Years. The episode in question, set in 2027, tackles the subject of “deepfakes” – videos in which a living person's face and voice are digitally manipulated to say anything the programmer wants.

In some cases, the deepfakes are almost indistinguishable from the real thing – which is particularly worrying for politicians and other people in the public eye. Videos that may initially have been created for laughs could easily be misinterpreted by viewers. Earlier this year, for example, a digitally altered video appeared to show Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, slurring drunkenly through a speech. The video was widely shared on Facebook and YouTube, before being tweeted by President Donald Trump with the caption: “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE”. The video was debunked, but not before it had been viewed millions of times. Trump has still not deleted the tweet, which has been retweeted over 30,000 times.

Of course, it’s not just democracy that is at risk, but also the economy, the legal system and even individuals themselves. Clarke warns that, if deepfake technology continues to evolve without a check, video evidence could lose its credibility during trials. It is not hard to imagine it being used by disgruntled ex-lovers, employees and random people on the internet to exact revenge and ruin people’s reputations. The software for creating these videos is already widely available.

However, after “THE END” of his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell includes another chapter, an appendix, called “The Principles of Newspeak.” Since it has the trappings of a tedious scholarly treatise, readers often skip the appendix. But it changes our whole understanding of the novel. Written from some unspecified point in the future, it suggests that Big Brother was eventually defeated. The

victory is attributed not to individual rebels or to The Brotherhood, an anonymous resistance group, but rather to language itself. The appendix details Oceania’s attempt to replace Oldspeak, or English, with Newspeak, a linguistic shorthand that reduces the world of ideas to a set of simple, stark words. “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” It will render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Fonte: Frost, Laura. http://qz.com/95696. Adaptado. Acesso em agosto de 2019.