Deepfakes and AI: the new frontier in Venezuela’s misinformation campaign

As Venezuela prepared for carnival season last month, an English-language video was published on the “House of News” YouTube channel. Its presenter Noah lauded an alleged tourism boom as millions of citizens flocked to the country’s Caribbean islands to party.

The report, which was widely circulated in media supportive of President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government, suggested claims about widespread impoverishment in oil-rich Venezuela had been “exaggerated”.

Another report claimed that the anti-Maduro interim government had been implicated in the alleged mismanagement of $152mn of funds before its recent dissolution, with Emma, the presenter, concluding that “Venezuelans do not actually feel there is any opposition to the government”.

But the two stories were fake, and the two newsreaders do not exist. They are avatars, based on real actors, that were generated using technology from Synthesia, an artificial intelligence company based in London. Their American accents were synthesised, their talking visages generated by machine-learning algorithms.

Last week, YouTube suspended five accounts, including House of News, that had shared government-aligned misinformation. But the emergence of deepfakes and AI-generated media represents a new frontier in Venezuela’s campaign of propaganda and misinformation, raising concerns about the potential influence on a population that has scant access to trustworthy news because of widespread censorship both on and offline.

“In Venezuela, there is a desert of information where disinformation can thrive,” said Adrián González, director of Cazadores de Fake News, a misinformation monitor based in Caracas. “And now the technology is there to make convincing fake news videos.”

González said the network of outlets in Venezuela distributing propaganda was vast, ranging from official media, independent but allied media and purveyors of fake news. On social media, posters have used automation tools to boost government talking points, helping posts reach the largest audiences.

Over the past year, generative AI technologies — software that can create images, videos and text based on user prompts and descriptions — have grown in popularity. Products such as Dall-E and ChatGPT are being widely…