Rubio Warns That 'Deepfake is Dangerous'

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) has released an advertisement warning that “deepfake is dangerous.” The advertisement includes footage of interviews with technology professionals, sounding the alarm on the dangers of deepfake technology.

The advertisement also includes footage of a speech Senator Rubio provided to the Heritage Foundation, urging people to be wary of deepfake technology and the repercussions that could come from it advancing too quickly.

In his speech for the Heritage Foundation, Senator Rubio had called deepfake technology a threat to national security. The advertisement shows technology being used to alter footage of President Barack Obama (D) and others.

During his speech years ago, Senator Rubio shared that “in the old days, if you wanted to threaten the United States, you needed 10 aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles.” “Today, you just need access to our internet system, to our banking system, to our electrical grid and infrastructure, and increasingly, all you need is the ability to produce a very realistic fake video that could undermine our elections, that could throw our country into tremendous crisis internally and weaken us deeply,” Senator Rubio continued.

He shared the advertisement on social media, captioning it with a call for people to “be able to recognize fact or fiction.”

In 2019, Senator Rubio and Virginia Senator Mark R. Warner (D) expressed their concern over the growing threat of deepfake.

Senator Rubio is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Warner is the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Both senators expressed that “as concerning as deepfakes and other multimedia manipulation techniques are for the subjects whose actions are falsely portrayed, deepfakes pose an especially grave threat to the public’s trust in the information in consumes” in 2019.

“If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images, it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy,” they said.