Keir Starmer and the danger of technology putting words in mouths

“Have you got it?” Sir Keir Starmer asks an unidentified underling.

“The f*****g tablet,” he adds.

“F**k sake.

“I literally told you, didn’t I? F**k sake.”

“Bloody moron. No, I’m sick of it.

“I’m f*****g sick of it.

“Every single time.

“Just shut your f*****g mouth.

“F*****g idiot.”

The 25-second clip did the rounds on social media early on Sunday, just as the party faithful gathered in Liverpool for the first day of Labour’s conference.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve listened to more than my fair share of Keir Starmer speeches, but while it sounded like the leader of the opposition, it didn’t really sound like the leader of the opposition.

It’s the second “f**k sake” that gives it away.

I’m not sure how many people were duped by the clip, but it’s now been played more than 1.5m times.

Its emergence on X formerly known as Twitter, along with a second clip purportedly of Starmer criticising Liverpool, certainly prompted a flurry of fears over deepfakes.

“I think there will be, definitely an avalanche of these videos,” Professor Ana Basiri tells The Herald when we sit down to talk deepfakes and their potential impact on democracy.

The Director of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Data Science and AI points out that half the world is having some sort of democratic event next year, including the UK General Election, the US Presidential Election, as well as major votes in India, Pakistan, and the European Parliament.

Deepfakes, she adds, a pretty good, “but the problem is they are getting much better at the rate that our detectors are not increasingly getting better.”

Prof Basiri compares it to virus and antivirus software. As soon as your antivirus software updates it’s already out of date as new viruses are created. Except that with deepfakes, that protection isn’t evolving quite quickly enough.

Part of the problem with detections is that they can take time, and, in politics, that can be a luxury.

Just two days before Slovakia’s elections, an audio recording was posted to Facebook of Michal Šimečka, who leads the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, and Monika Tódová from the daily newspaper Denník N discussing how to rig the election.

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Although they immediately denounced it as fake it was posted online during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, which meant the debunking struggled to get the same traction.

Even the Starmer video has not actually been debunked yet. The original poster - who seems to be some sort of wind-up merchant - insists it’s genuine.

Our friends at the Ferret Fact-Checking Service were only able to say that it was “likely” the clip was faked.

None of this is helped by the chaos on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Despite policy stating that video or audio that has been deceptively altered or manipulated should be labelled or removed, it often isn't.

Prof Basiri tells me says there’s an “extremely bad combination” of very good technologies, an unprepared population and a lack of regulation.

“There is a problem because I could be a terrible person developing a terrible video just for fun, you know, vandalism is a part of that.“

“And this is a really risky time because AI moves very fast, so any vandalism can damage heavily because it is so ubiquitous in our life,” she adds.

There is “a high risk to our democracy," the professor says. 

It doesn’t take much to manipulate an election. We know that. 

At the Holyrood vote in 2021, the far-right A Force For Good group set up an ostensibly fake political party, Independent Green Voice.

They existed solely on the ballot paper. They had no campaign, no online presence.

And yet they won 2,210 votes in Glasgow and 1,690 in the South of Scotland.

At the time, the polling expert Mark Diffley told me that if all those votes had gone to the Scottish Greens, they’d have had two extra seats.

Just think what a group like that could do with the technology to put words into a politician’s mouth.