Or pandering? Or just saying something stupid? The usual answer is: His lips are moving.
But this morning, I saw Joe Biden being quoted as saying that ‘a black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison’. My usual rule for this kind of thing is: video or it didn’t happen. So I found the video, and there’s a problem: In the video, Biden is wearing a mask. So you can’t see whether his lips are moving at all, let alone whether they match up with the audio.
We’ve heard a lot lately about how deepfakes are making it possible to make it look like someone said something he never actually said. To do it well requires a lot of technology, and a lot of data — you have to assemble a corpus of corresponding facial movements and sounds for the subject of the fake.
But with politicians running around wearing masks, you can fake something using simple dubbing. Which is to say, masks are allowing us to ignore the deepfake in favor of the shallowfake.
