Hank Stephenson has a finely tuned B.S. detector. The longtime journalist has made a living sussing out lies and political spin.
But even he was fooled at first when he watched the video of one of his home state’s most prominent congressional candidates.
There was Kari Lake, the Republican Senate hopeful from Arizona, on his phone screen, speaking words written by a software engineer. Stephenson was watching a deepfake — an artificial-intelligence-generated video produced by his news organization, Arizona Agenda, to underscore the dangers of AI misinformation in a pivotal election year.
“When we started doing this, I thought it was going to be so bad it wouldn’t trick anyone, but I was blown away,” Stephenson, who co-founded the site in 2021, said in an interview. “And we are unsophisticated. If we can do this, then anyone with a real budget can do a good enough job that it’ll trick you, it’ll trick me, and that is scary.”