The tech fleece looked fake

Today, I woke up to the shocking news that the US captured Maduro in Caracas. I won’t go into the loads of political takes from across the US and Europe, and instead wanted to talk about why it was among the most interesting days of geopolitics of my life so far.

I happened to be in the right place at the right time during a trip to La Guajira, and was able to hear perspectives from Colombians, Venezuelans living in Colombia, and Venezuelans that left from Maracaibo this morning.

What was so interesting, was that everyone was either confused or questioning everything.

Colombians and Venezuelans in Colombia disagreed about Maduro being killed in the strikes or said that he wasn’t actually captured.

From the “cousins in the military in Caracas,” the news was not any clearer at all, and filled with information that we now know is false. That he was killed in the strikes and not actually flown to New York, that they got some other guy, etc.

There were AI images floating around early in the morning of “the capture,” that are now obviously fake. But in the moment they clearly were not obvious! Some were just some deep fakes of Maduro being guided out of a plane and others were meant to just be humorous.

But then, later in the day, we got the real image of Maduro in the full Nike tech fleece on USS Iwo Jima and I immediately saw the outfit and was like, “nah, that’s just more deep fake crap. Why would he be captured in a full tech fleece?” It genuinely took me a bit to process that this one was real.

But then it had me scratching my head and questioning myself. Am I getting fooled by deep fakes now? Am I misclassifying real images now out of my skepticism? I’m clearly not alone, so I am curious which way we’re actually moving online: are we moving more towards false positives or false negatives when classifying an image as an “obvious fake”?

It was such a mind boggling experience to see that even those with extreme proximity to the event fell for deep fakes too. Like, the guy in the middle of Europe might have been falling for the exact same content as the guy literally in Caracas himself disseminating the fake information to his cousin over WhatsApp.

This was the first major geopolitical event that I tracked closely after good consumer image/video models were released. I’ve gotta say, things feel different now. It’s not all that immediately obvious what’s fake now. I can confidently say this now, after seeing the people with the most proximity and the most at stake fall for deep fakes.