Ah
, this has been a topic of discussion in the USA as well. For example, legitimate video evidence of a convenience store robbery could be argued to be plausibly fake because of the existence of such fakes.
It certainly does complicate matters, however, there are still ways of identifying fakes. There was a major scandal in the United States not reported in our press in which approximately 120 CIA officers disappeared while on assignment in various countries and the loss was attributed to the use of these deepfake photographs. In 2019, they began a program run out of Defense Programs Support Activity in Elkridge, Maryland called OPTIC which used experimental NVidia software to create fake photos where an actual likeness of a CIA officer was pasted upon what is term a 'mannequin' body and the faces and the bodies were incorporated into various scenes such as home scenes, vacation scenes, work scenes and these photos were used to populate Facebook accounts. The rationale was that if they created a false identity but the false identity didn't have a Facebook account associated with it that the person would fall under suspicion, but of course, the extent to which the absence of a Facebook account is suspicious was greatly exaggerated. What was, indeed, suspicious, was the fact that the images were obvious forgeries. The weakness of these covers made perhaps the largest impact in Afghanistan, where the CIA officers, due to their untimely deaths, were unable to make the necessary payoffs to Afghan National Army commanders, resulting in the rapid Taliban takeover.
After that incident, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was tasked with developing their own software which could perform the same task as the NVidia software, but more seamlessly. LLNL keeps releases incremental improvements, but the reality is that humans have the ability to identify images as "uncanny" even when they cannot put their finger on which specific elements are uncanny. Foreign intelligence services are not going to ignore uncanny images and absolutely will take action based upon hunches. Instinct is heavily relied upon by all intelligence personnel in the field. The American intelligence agencies seem to think that foreign intelligence services work like a court of law wherein everything must be proven absolutely. The reality is that if there is suspicion that the images are fake, the cover is blown. The Americans have somehow forgotten even the most basic tenets of running an intelligence service.
I've always said it was ironic that after MI6 trained up the OSS, they kept the Special Training School #103 open as an assassination and drug smuggling school for many years but completely forgot how to do their jobs in the process. In 1969 when some Senators started sniffing around to find out how Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, they abruptly closed the school in Whitby, Ontario.
