During Monday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called out some right-wing outlets for using manipulative deepfakes and “cheapfakes” to “attack” President Joe Biden. Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy was in the room for those comments, and he responded on Fox & Friends on Tuesday.
Doocy explained the difference between “deepfakes” and “cheapfakes,” but he also put them in perspective:
During the briefing yesterday, though, she referred to “cheapfakes” and also deepfakes while dismissing these clips. But there’s an important difference. A deepfake is if somebody is using AI or some other software to change the things that President Biden is doing or saying. A cheapfake is just if a clip is cut shorter than they want, or from an angle that they don’t like. Both of them are the same though, in that they are both being used as terms to scapegoat as this White House just does not want people to think that the things they see on social media are as they appear.
Fox News is just one of several outlets that repeatedly ran video of Biden from the G7 Summit that appeared to show him aimlessly wandering off. The full video revealed that he had actually approached a skydiver to give them a thumbs-up. (Fox’s Jeanine Pirro did provide accurate commentary on the video.)
Doocy did explain that in the case of cheapfakes, context is important, but with a caveat:
[T]here is something to the fact that a lot of these clips are lacking context. That doesn’t mean that the things people see are not happening. Like, you see something, these clips are not being manipulated with AI. There are, there are, but there’s always context. The thing is, every video that you see on the internet is in some way edited or clipped, unless you’re rewatching an entire livestream of something played back from start to finish. Everything is cut at some point. And White House officials just want the clips to be way longer so that people can see way more context.
Continued…
Approved ~ MJM
