June 4, 2023
When the Joke Is Synthetic: Political Satire’s Deepfake Problem
Political satire has always needed one thing to work: an audience that can tell the joke from the news. Synthetic video is the first technology in the genre’s long history to make that line genuinely hard to see, for the audience and sometimes for the satirists themselves. Political satire has always lived close to a line: exaggerate enough to make the point, but stay far enough from reality that nobody mistakes the joke for the news. Synthetic video and audio have made that line much harder to see, for creators and audiences alike, and the genre is visibly struggling to
