The book is doubly original in its subject matter – “hyper fakes” or deepfakes made possible by AI – and in its style, which is both precise and spontaneous. It presents the evolution of counterfeits, fakes, simulations, manipulations… throughout the ages. It shows that AI – especially in its generative version that appeared in 2022 with the ChatGPT solution – has accelerated the movement of disinformation, some of whose objectives, contrary to the ethics of AI, aim to hide the truth (“post-truth”), to disguise reality (“hyper-reality”), to simulate an object or influence a subject (nudging). This propensity of AI to “falsify reality” has been multiplied by increasingly massive data processing, mainly from exchanges on social networks. It is also due to the interoperability of communication vectors (voice, images, videos,texts), but also to the development of software between geopolitical blocks, nation-states, political currents, social groups, etc.
The author provides a wealth of examples, some well-known, some less so, of fake news, cheap fakes and deep fakes, with tragicomic or dramatic consequences, but he is above all engaged in a philosophical (or rather philological) reflection on the representations of reality due to Plato (the “myth of the cave”), to Kant (the “phenomena”), to Baudrillard (the “simulations and simulacra”), to Debord (the “society of the spectacle”), to Benjamin (the “loss of authenticity”), to Rivault d’Allone (the “weakness of the true”) and to Guerouanou (his doctoral thesis on the “vertigo of anthropotechnics”). Olivier Laskar analyzes the ongoing research on falsification and simulation techniques, but also on the detection of fakes and plagiarism (debunking) and the tracing of fakes (water making). In particular, he presents the French project Moshi, which foreshadows the conversational robots of tomorrow, whose image and voice simulate “almost to perfection” the exchanges and emotions of subjects in a given situation. This new “fake technology” is developed by the offer of easily accessible open source software, emanating from start-ups and academic research laboratories. These developments fuel the practices of nudging (influence), green washing (greening of projects), social bashing (denigration)…, but they also raise new, more philosophical questions about the notions of truth and reality, normal and paranormal.
Olivier Laskar (engineer) is editor-in-chief of the digital division of the journal Sciences et Avenir.
note by J-J.Pluchart
