Today, we know that many people are fooled by deepfakes, thinking they are real. But when we look at deepfake damage we think of adults. What about children?
It’s probably just as well that Fred Rogers passed away in 2003, years before technology allowed us to create deepfakes of everything.
Including Fred Rogers.
Rogers occupied a unique role. He transported his young viewers from their real world into a world of make-believe, but took care to explain to his young viewers that there was a difference between make-believe and reality. For example, he once hosted a woman named Margaret Hamilton, who explained that she was not really a witch.
Note the intelligence with which Hamilton treats her audience, by the way.
But back in Mister Rogers’ day, some people imposed make-believe on Rogers’ own make-believe, something that distressed Rogers because of his fear that it would confuse the children. Rogers objected to most of these portrayals, with the exception of Eddie Murphy’s. Children were fast asleep by the time “Mister Robinson” appeared on TV on Saturday nights. And Murphy’s character addressed serious topics such as gentrification.
But today we see things that are not real, but even adults think they are real. And that’s the adults; how do today’s children respond to deepfakes? If children of the 1930s were confused by a witch in a movie, how do children of today respond to things that look all too real?
And if kids do not have discernment view deepfakes, kids who create them don’t have that discernment either.
“Last October, a 13-year-old boy in Wisconsin used a picture of his classmate celebrating her bat mitzvah to create a deepfake nude he then shared on Snapchat….
“[M]any of the state laws don’t apply to explicit AI-generated deepfakes. Fewer still appear to directly grapple with the fact that perpetrators of deepfake abuse are often minors.”
Once again, technology outpaces our efforts to regulate it or examine its ethical considerations.
Fred would be horrified.
Bredemarket 