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Politics

Turkish Presidential Candidate Quits Race After Release of Alleged Deepfake (theguardian.com) 38

Turkish presidential candidate Muharrem Ince withdrew from the race after an alleged sex tape circulated online. Ince claims it's a deepfake using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." The Guardian reports: Ince, a two-time presidential candidate who also lost to Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018, pulled his candidacy just days away from Turkey's most consequential election in a generation saying: "I offered Turkey a third option, a third way. We couldn't succeed with this way."

The former school headteacher and longtime member of the Republican People's party (CHP) said an alleged sex tape circulating online was a deepfake, using footage taken from "an Israeli porn site." He added: "If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it's slander. It's not real."

The high-profile deployment of deepfake videos has already hit Turkey's 45-day election cycle, after Erdogan played an alleged deepfake that claimed to show banned Kurdish militants declaring their support for Kilicdaroglu at a pre-election rally last weekend. "What I have seen in these last 45 days, I have not seen in 45 years," said Ince.

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Turkish Presidential Candidate Quits Race After Release of Alleged Deepfake

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  • Test Run. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kellin ( 28417 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @04:31PM (#63514997)

    Test Run for every other election race on the planet. We're in deep shit.

    • Test Run for every other election race on the planet. We're in deep shit.

      ... decent candidates will quit disgusted, the ones with no morals will be accepted by they electorate anyway

      • by necro81 ( 917438 )

        ... decent candidates will quit disgusted, the ones with no morals will be accepted by they electorate anyway

        Indeed. If watching politics (in the US, abroad) over the past few decades has told me anything, it is that a politician can weather just about anything so long as they have no sense of shame or decency. Indeed, the more boldly a politician embraces what ought to be shameful, the quicker the storm passes.

        It is, unfortunately, a moral toxin for the rest of government and society. But it certai

    • Dear God I hope nobody starts posting pics of naked Trump online.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      Why? Politics is a dirty business and always has been. The methods and tools change, but the fundamentals are the same.

      Anyone with a working brain isn't trusting any politicians anyway. We know that their campaign promises are not what they really want to do, but what their advisors tell them they need to say in order to gain the most votes. We know the game and its rules. Why do we constantly act surprised when the brown stuff they've been telling us is chocolate turns out to be something else? Like it did

  • AI isn't the problem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by narcc ( 412956 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @04:48PM (#63515039) Journal

    Deepfakes aren't going to be a problem. The problem is that deepfakes are going to be used to cast doubt on real photos and recordings. The last thing we need in this post-truth world.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      It's not like faked, staged and edited photos and videos were a totally new thing.

      It's also not like we couldn't find people looking really, really similar to other people (several stars have entered look-alike contests without their usual stage/movie makup and professional hairdressers, etc. and LOST).

      It's just that AI is putting these tools into the hands of people who otherwise wouldn't have the skills and/or resources to do it.

    • That has been my long-running concern with public information databases, including credit reporting agencies: not that true information gets out but that false information gets in. Those databases are used in identity verification*, and if they get enough false data it will become impossible for us to prove who we are**.

      *: Have you every had to verify an account with questions like "Which of these four addresses have you lived at" or similar? That's identity verification through one of these databases. What

  • Deepfake? Suuure.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @04:52PM (#63515041)

    AFAIK current deepfakes can generally be detected. Are there any security / AI / recording specialists saying this video is a deepfake? Or is it just him.

    But to get to the more obvious bit.

    He added: "If I had such images of myself, they were taken secretly in the past. But I do not have such an image, no such sound recording. This is not my private life, it's slander. It's not real."

    As a rule of thumb when a person says something along the lines of "I didn't do X, but if I did do X I wouldn't have done it in that way" they're basically admitting to doing X.

    • Blaming it on an Israeli porn site in particular also sounds suspiciously like a Muslim blaming "The Jews" so to speak.
    • AFAIK current deepfakes can generally be detected.

      That is completely irrelevant. No amount of proof of anything matters in politics.

  • by jonfr ( 888673 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:21PM (#63515077)

    I am sure this deepfake is made and authorized by Erdogan and his allies. Since he is a dictator over Turkey and has been for several years now. He won't rule forever, but his time in office is going to be horrible one as it has been up to this day.

    • Re:Made by Erdogan (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:57PM (#63515153)

      He's like a lot of other dictators, such as Putin. They do something good early on and then the backers believe that they have to keep supporting him or else go back to the bad old days. Also they control the narrative - anytime you see a government cracking down on the free press it's a good sign that there's a proto-dictatorship sprouting.

      But even if, hypothetically, a dictator is doing good it will still cause everything to fall apart once the dictatorship is over. There's almost always chaos when the dictator is overthrow or dies. Exception being mostly North Korea where they set up the hereditary dictatorship with the family cast as literal deities.

    • Re:Made by Erdogan (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Thursday May 11, 2023 @07:06PM (#63515257) Homepage

      I am sure this deepfake is made and authorized by Erdogan and his allies.

      No, not in this instance.

      See, the major opposition parties have mostly agreed to back one candidate (Kemal Kilicdaroglu) so as not to split the vote like in past elections.

      This guy, Ince, did not abide by this agreement, and was running as a candidate.

      Now that he is out of the picture, perhaps Kilicdaroglu has a better chance of finally defeating Erdogan and ending his two decade hold on power in Turkey.

      We will see ...

      • Odds are the opposition will defeat Erdogan in a fair election. Odds are even higher that Erdogan will do everything in his power to tip the scale in his favor and steal the election. Sadly, it looks like Turkey is on the cusp of massive protests and riots for a stolen election, and then a bloody crackdown by Erdogan's loyal government forces. What is less clear is the motivation of Russia to produce a deepfake video that defames a candidate who could have diluted the power of the opposition party. The
        • by kbahey ( 102895 )

          The most to benefit from this are Kilicdaroglu and the various parties that back him.
          So from this point of view, they could be the ones that did it.
          But without further proof one can't decisively say they did it.
          It could be a false flag (Russia excels at those), or could be that Ince was really filmed doing these.

          The same goes for Russia: not enough evidence to decisively blame them for it.
          They do have other things to benefit (e.g. Turkey is NATO, so chaos within a member is beneficial. Besides, Kilicdaroglu

  • One half the country thinks the other guy is a walking talking deepfake, and the other half of the country thinks a deepfake would be an improvement over what we've actually got.

    Brilliant!

    Also the whole limited government thing making politics here less consequential than in other parts of the world where bad government equals immediate starvation for the masses.

  • we expect him to always be screwing something.

/earth: file system full.

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