It’s probably a good thing that I can’t find a copy of the recent viral Jon Stewart clip to share — especially since the video doesn’t feature Jon Stewart at all.
archive.is
Instead, a creepy Polar Express-style Stewart delivers a rant about tariffs against India. It’s not particularly sharp comedy, but if you weren’t listening too hard, you might not have noticed this wasn’t an actual Stewart tirade:
“So Trump’s throwing a 50% tariff on India for buying Russian oil? Like that’s gonna scare a country with 5000 years of history. India looked at him like, Bro, we survived the British, we can survive your math. He’s up there yelling, No more cheap goods from India! Meanwhile, his tie is made in China, his hotel towels are from Mumbai, and his hairpiece is probably outsourced too.”
Don’t Miss
Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are playing Whac-a-Mole with the video, removing it as new copies pop up. Several sites have run analyses demonstrating that the video’s a fake, not that one needs to be a forensic scientist to figure this out. Stewart’s current beard is missing, for one thing. The Daily Show has been on hiatus during the time Trump imposed a tariff on India, for another. The Quint ran a test on the fake Stewart voice — an AI voice detector gave the audio an authenticity score of 22 out of 100, a failing grade by anyone’s standard.
The fact that social media sites are yanking the deepfaked comedy is great — for now. But the video has no doubt fooled some fans, thanks to its sorta passable AI version of Stewart. What happens in six months or a year when both the video and audio quality jump up another level? Will the clips be believable enough to trick even the hosting sites?
Imitating a satiric rant is one thing. What happens when AI Jon Stewart convinces people to buy into conspiracy theories? To invest in his crypto scam? To confront lawmakers with whom he disagrees? The slope gets slippery fast, and it’s not hard to see where we go from here.
We’ve already had enterprising idiots create AI versions of George Carlin, creating new comedy specials out of the ether. Now we have fake versions of fake Jon Stewart, who already makes a living delivering fake news. If The Daily Show is your primary source of political news, the potential for misinformation is mindboggling. And the comedy implications aren’t nearly the half of it.
Stewart himself told us about the dangers of AI and deepfakes last year: “Your fake Joe Biden robocall that tells New Hampshire voters not to vote, your Chicago mayoral candidate glorifying police brutality, your Donald Trump dropping by the neighborhood for a stoop hang,” he said. “And as AI gets better and better, it’s only gonna make it more difficult to separate fact from fiction, which could be terrifying.”
