If you, like me, believe yourself to be a scrupulous consumer of news, full of healthy skepticism and too smart for that fake-news bullshit, Jordan Peele has got a big, stiff-ass cup of wake-the-hell-up for you. Yesterday, Peele released a video with BuzzFeed News titled "You Won't Believe What Obama Says in This Video [winky-face emoji]"—something that seems really easy to gloss over if you're accustomed to viral stunts. But you should watch this one, because it's a really good reminder of how easily conned we can be in 2018.
The video shows what appears to be Barack Obama talking about how easily faked public statements can be, before revealing that it's not actually Obama but Jordan Peele doing his extremely good Obama impression with the help of some AI puppets that are becoming frighteningly easy to use.
If you look at it closely, you can see that it looks a bit suspect—the lower half of "Obama's" face is a bit off, and the hand movements are weird—but if you're not primed to look for this stuff, it's incredibly easy to miss. (Besides, we watch most videos on tiny screens where glitchy giveaways can be written off as hiccups in Internet service.) Peele's PSA uses his Fake Obama to have a little fun (he calls Trump a dipshit, and signs off with "stay woke, bitches"), but also to stress the importance of news literacy, skepticism, and trust in established and credible news sources.
Of course, it's not hard to imagine this PSA immediately being taken out of context and parts of it (like the "Trump is a dipshit" part) passed as Obama's actual words on some subreddit somewhere. It's nice to remember how well and truly screwed we are.
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