[ACS_Solver]

My dystopian techno-political prediction is that the 2024 presidential election in the US will have major impact from deepfakes.

With current tech, deepfakes can be really good. The linked one is pretty much there, it's super convincing. When I know it's fake, something seems a bit off about how "Cruise's" head is in relation to his body when he walks through the doorframe but that's it. If I wasn't actively looking for anything fake, I would not have registered that either.

Whoever runs for POTUS in '24, it's certain that both candidates will be well-known people with lots of video material for training a model. It's also certain that many groups and individuals will be strongly vested in the outcome of the election, and some of them will have the resources to produce deepfakes at least as convincing as "Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton" here - this is no longer something that requires hardware worth millions to run for two months straight.

There will be fake videos of the candidates doing/saying highly scandalous stuff. Going on a racist rant, expressing corrupt intent, promising illegal things, etc. And those videos, if somewhat intelligently produced, will have a big impact once they air, no matter if they can be definitively proven to be fake later.