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Opinion

Deepfakes

SKETCHES - Ana Marie Pamintuan - The Philippine Star

While checking out the latest BTS songs last week, I came across several YouTube video clips reporting that the super K-pop group’s Jungkook was rushed to a military hospital emergency room in South Korea and then flown to the United States “in critical condition” due to poisoning.

The story thread said he fell ill due to bullying suffered at the hands of one of his superior officers while on mandatory military service.

There were snippets of supposedly stolen videos showing his maltreatment while in the military, and an unconscious Jungkook being wheeled into a hospital emergency room.

The defense minister of South Korea, according to another video, reportedly found it necessary to visit Jungkook at the military hospital to check on the condition of one of the country’s most famous ambassadors of goodwill.

We chased the story briefly but couldn’t find a single account in any of the foreign wire services.

Later, I noticed that the defense minister reported in one of the clips was identified as Han Duck-soo, South Korea’s prime minister who briefly became acting president following the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol, but who himself was later also impeached.

Scrolling through more videos, I also saw a follow-up story featuring K-drama superstar Cha Eun-woo supposedly hopping on a flight to New York to be with his “good friend” Jungkook.

The video looked too much like old promo footage featuring Cha Eun-woo. Combined with the mention of Han Duck-soo, I smelled an attempt to use AI-generated video, either as clickbait or to discredit the military conscription system in South Korea, from which not even that country’s global superstars seek VIP exemption.

As of yesterday, the fake videos were still circulating on YouTube.

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Who would benefit from such black propaganda about the Koreans’ compulsory military service? I could think of only the lone foe of the South, North Korea.

Cyber warfare experts have said most of the illegal global cyber activities emanate from only a handful of countries, with North Korea, Russia and China topping the list.

North Korea is believed to be the source of the Feb. 4, 2016 cyber attack on the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York, wherein the hackers successfully transferred $101 million of the targeted $951 million in deposits of the Bangladesh central bank. Of 35 instructions for fund transfers, only five were approved by the US bank. Of the $101 million approved for transfer, $20 million was sent to Sri Lanka and $81 million to a bank and then casinos in the global financial black hole, the Philippines.

Today there’s controversy surrounding Chinese spying activities in the Philippines. It’s plausible that five suspects arrested recently with high-resolution solar-powered cameras and drones could have been snooping on resupply and patrol missions of the Philippine Coast Guard and Philippine Navy in the West Philippine Sea.

The five are reportedly linked to a Chinese apprehended in Makati on Jan. 17 with a mapping gadget in the trunk of his car, tagged by law enforcers as a “sleeper agent” for Beijing. Doubters say that surely a nation that can develop DeepSeek and send a team to the moon can do better than that gadget to collect data that can be obtained by satellite and even by Google Maps.

Apart from the deepfakes featuring Jungkook and Cha Eun-woo, there were also AI-generated mashups on YouTube of the latest songs of Taylor Swift and other pop superstars, performed by their AI-generated likenesses.

Think of what such deepfakes can do for mind conditioning especially in places with low digital literacy, and of how they can influence public opinion and elections.

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Such concerns have spiked following the rollout by a Chinese company of DeepSeek, which provides ChatGPT-type generative AI services at a fraction of the capital outlay and user cost.

As it is, social media is already the repository of a universe of unfiltered, unreliable, misleading and malicious information.

The Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group is still trying to trace the source of what it described as a “spliced” video claiming that the PNP has dropped requirements for mandatory drug testing and neuropsychiatric examination for the uniformed services. The requirements, the PNP clarified, were dropped only for cops obtaining gun licenses and permits.

DeepSeek could expand exponentially that universe of garbage.

Even e-commerce reviews are unreliable. I have been receiving Viber messages offering me a part-time job that can supposedly make me earn from P5,000 to P9,000 a day just to “like” products being sold on Shopee. Simply watching a two-minute demo of the proposal would earn for me P160, according to one message.

Maybe the message senders are trying to access e-wallet accounts and other information for financial transactions. But we cannot completely rule out the possibility that they are genuinely seeking paid product endorsers for online shopping platforms.

That will render the star ranking system for online products and services as unreliable as the paid endorsements for certain candidates on social media.

People will now have to be more discerning not only about their sources of news and current affairs (which must be subjected to multiple vetting before public release, like we do in newspapers), but also about reviews of products and services touted online.

In our land of the comprehension-challenged, unfortunately, this discernment could prove even tougher than making informed choices during elections.

JUNGKOOK

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