Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

How to fake it till you make it

Muharrem Ince, the defeated presidential candidate of the Republican People's Party (Getty Images) 
issue 20 May 2023

Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the thing about the future is that it catches up with you awfully fast.

For a while we have been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence and the special hazards of ‘deepfakes’. It seemed so futuristic when we saw a deepfake of Barack Obama some years ago, which demonstrated how easy it was to put words into someone’s mouth that they did not say. Well, now we have had an example in real time. Or at least the electorate in Turkey have.

Personally I am not persuaded that Turkey’s election was ever likely to be entirely fair and free. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said that democracy is like a tram: you take it until it gets you to your destination – the destination, presumably, being such a time as elections become unnecessary.

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