Fiction
The Challenger
What to do when a politician runs out of steam mid-campaign?
“Either the guy is seriously ill or his brain is fried and he’s turning into a fucking avocado!”
“You should have a bit more respect, Mitch! He’s your boss, and he’s going to be the next President!” Amy hissed.
“Not if he keeps performing like he did today. You might believe that nobody could blow a ten-point lead in 100 days, but that performance was incoherent, incompetent.” Mitch had a lot of steam to let off. “It was everything the President was dreaming it would be. He tweeted so many times during the speech that he must have his fat little fingers on ice now. He’s about to grant himself a Ph.D. in Neurology from his own university.”
“Okay! Enough! Our guy wobbled a bit. But he’s still got some fundamental advantages.” Amy sighed, clearly deflated. “For one thing, he’s not a sociopathic narcissist with the self-control of a four-year-old.”
“Well, if Amy’s reverting to pointing out that our guy isn’t quite as bad as the President,” a smoky voice curled up from behind a massive laptop computer screen, “then we are in more trouble than anybody realized.”
The dark mood backstage wasn’t about to lift. A few weeks ago, the campaign had looked as near to a done deal as politics had ever seen. One could hear the hissing as the President’s bubble of self-referential hot-air deflated. The guy was toast, not only on the way out of office but sure to find himself near the bottom of any set of Presidential rankings. That prospect, if anything, would sting his super-sized pride.
Eventually, the shadow behind the computer screen spoke again. “I’d been hoping it wouldn’t come to this yet, but I’ve been working on something that just might save us.”
“Great, Zeke,” said Amy, unable to muster even a hint of her usual enthusiasm. “Our guy is a decent man, and he will give this country what it needs most: four years with an adult in charge.”
“Our candidate isn’t going to be that adult, Amy. I agree with Mitch; he’s taken this thing as far as he can. He’s slipping away from us, and we are going to have four more years in which the incumbent cretin will sell everything we own to Putin, start World War Three, and break the Republic so badly that it can never be fixed.”
That got Amy animated. “Our candidate is the only hope we have! He’s the only hope our country has! It’s 100 days out; he’s about to announce his running mate. What the actual fuck are you suggesting, Zeke?”
“Remember that time Obama got caught on video calling Trump a ‘dipshit’?” Zeke asked.
“That wasn’t him! It was kids screwing around on the Internet. You of all people should know that, Zeke!” Mitch snorted, not sure if Zeke was taking the piss. “It was a fake.”
“It was a Deepfake,” Zeke corrected, “they fed a deep neural network all the video that could get of Obama talking. Its job was to learn how to discriminate between real videos of Obama and everything else. Then they set up another network to make new video clips and throw them at the discriminator.”
“I’m a campaign manager, Zeke, not a computer geek,” Amy steamed, returning to a semblance of her usual nuclear intensity. “You’re going to have to start doing what we pay you for and explaining what you mean, and how fake videos of Obama being profane could possibly help us win this election.”
“You don’t pay me, Amy. You couldn’t possibly make it worth my while. I volunteered for this campaign, and only partly because I care about this country as much as you or that guy who is straining valiantly to look like a credible candidate.”
“Okay, Zeke. What are you suggesting?” Mitch jumped in. Having been the first to lose his temper, he now tried to smooth things down.
“As I was explaining,” the tech billionaire turned volunteer began, “these kinds of paired networks, called ‘Generative Adversarial Networks’ or ‘GANs,’ are one of the biggest things in Artificial Intelligence. They can make new content by learning how someone speaks, moves, and looks.”
“Like Obama calling Trump a dipshit?” Mitch butted in.
“Exactly.”
“I volunteered for this campaign because I believe the Russians got that particular dipshit over the line last time. With four more years of AI development under their belts, I was terrified of what they might try this time around. Now, I think we might be able to use the new technology to get our own guy over the line. Or, more exactly, to throw the other guy out.”
“For a few weeks, now, I’ve been feeding a couple of GANs all the recent video I have of our candidate. It’s already generating excellent video, and it has the voice nailed down. Here … check this out.”
Amy and Mitch craned over Zeke’s shoulder as he cued up a video on his laptop. For two minutes, they watched the candidate fronting a camera, a busy streetscape behind him, absolutely nailing his three main campaign messages. No stumbles, no meandering anecdotes, and no gaffes.
“I don’t remember any of that. Where did you get that footage?” gasped Amy, her legendary attention to detail suddenly challenged.
“That’s the whole point,” Zeke replied. “Nothing in that video happened. Not the speech, not the streetscape, not even the people walking past in the background. I simply fed three days’ worth of talking points to the computer. Challenger put those talking points together with what it has learned about his patterns of speech, his intonations, and facial expressions. Then it generated the video of him and put it in front of a streetscape generated from footage of Midwestern suburban streetscape footage”.
“That’s amazing!” Despite herself, Amy began to show an interest.
An old-school campaign manager, Amy had enough sense to know what she didn’t know. Mitch had been a no-brainer, a polling and numbers wizard who had helped Amy get three consecutive underdogs elected. Zeke, however, had come to her and offered to cover her weakest suit: tech.
Having made a fortune developing Artificial Intelligence marketing tools, and a much bigger fortune when his company AIMx listed, Zeke had decided that running a large public company wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. He had approached Amy and offered his services for free. What’s more, he brought a small team of four with him, all on his personal payroll.
“What I need now, Amy, is a copy of Tomorrow’s video speech to feed into the generator network. My algorithms already know a lot about our guy, so they will be able to generate a video overnight. I guarantee even his wife will think it is real.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Mitch clearly wasn’t having any of it. “Are you proposing we generate a video using AI, rather than by filming our candidate and then passing it off as the real thing? To voters? Do you have any idea how insane you sound?”
“Or how the press will crucify us if they figure it out?” Amy added. “This is a Presidential election. Every voter, commentator, and troll in the world will be watching!”
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Zeke plowed on, undeterred. “He’s up against an incumbent who lies three times before he draws breath in the morning, and who bleats ‘fake news’ every time somebody says something he doesn’t like. If the wingnut press start a conspiracy theory, and their rusted-on fans share it in their bubbles, we are no worse off than we always were.”
“But what if a real journalist smells a rat? What happens then?” Mitch asked, clearly interested now.
“Aah! Real journalists! That noble, dwindling species. That’s going to be an issue later on, I’m sure. And we will have to work hard to stay ahead of them. But I’ve got some plans for that. For now, let’s take this one step at a time.”
Zeke went on, “Tomorrow’s video address is just the beginning. It’s a controlled environment, and one that people expect will be shot in several takes and edited within an inch of its life. If we slip up, it will look like a continuity lapse. But slip-ups, gaffes, and continuity lapses are our best friend right now.”
“What do you mean?” Amy asked.
“Because Challenger combines the very best Deepfake generation, discrimination, and integration tools the world has ever seen. The videos it is already spitting out are too perfect. Remember the Deepfake video of me resigning from AIMx?”
“No,” said Mitch, “I saw the real video but didn’t realize there was a Deepfake.”
“The video you saw was the Deepfake. I never recorded a video. I was already enjoying my retirement in Kauai when Challenger made that video. When I watched it, however, I realized the algorithm had ironed out the kinds of inconsistencies any human has. So we’ve been working on retaining some of those inconsistencies.”
“What else have you faked? Who else knows what you can do?” Amy asked.
“Nobody else knows,” Zeke jumped in, determined not to let Amy start spraying her infamous automatic-fire questions at him. “Only me, my team, and now you two know what we can do. Same for my Deepfaked resignation video, or, as I prefer to call it, my ‘audition tape.’ I thought an opportunity like this might come up. I knew it would be too risky to run any outside trials or bring anyone else in.”
“Well, thank God for that,” Amy sighed. Even if they didn’t use any of Zeke’s deepfake abilities, they’d be accused of it if anybody else heard even a whisper about these capabilities.
Zeke knew he had to close this deal quickly. “When you let me volunteer, Amy, I told you I would bring ‘the best tools that AI could offer any campaign.’ In three weeks with you, we’ve already exposed over a hundred lies, inconsistencies, or plain nasty statements from this President and his acolytes. That’s not hard; the guy gives us too much material. What’s more important, we’ve used AI tools to feed them into social media bubbles that favor him. We’ve optimized every post to turn voters away from him without getting them kicked out of their bubbles. That’s good defense because none of it looks like it’s coming from us.”
“It’s showing in the polls,” Mitch added. You’re turning swing voters in battleground states our way. The other side has no idea how we’re doing it.”
“Okay,” said Amy, clearly coming to a decision. “Make the video, and we can compare it with our candidate’s video after we shoot it tomorrow. It’s only four minutes long, and it’s for the faithful. I’m going way out on a limb here, Zeke. But I think these are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures.”
Amy headed off to return some calls. It was dawning on her what Zeke meant by ‘offense.’ She just didn’t know for sure which meaning of the word ‘offense’ would turn out to be more apt.
Needless to say, the events in this story are not real. Nor are the people other than named public figures who are somewhat peripheral to the tale. I haven’t written much fiction before and I’d be delighted to hear from people who want to know how this story develops, or who can help me sharpen my fiction writing.
Check out Part II