On the last America This Week, Walter Kirn and I introduced “HAIWIRE,” a game for training intelligence professionals to respond to AI-created information crises. One of the cards in this Dungeons & Dragons-style game read, “An easy-to-use voice model helps create a viral video suggesting that one of the candidates may have dementia”:
Developed by In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, HAIWIRE was ostensibly designed to help officials role-play responses to AI-generated hoaxes, but it read more like a catalog of messaging proposals. It was therefore shocking to learn White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre literally played the above MIND GAMES card yesterday, suggesting provably real videos of an infirm and confused president Joe Biden were “cheapfakes” and “deepfakes”:
I’ll come back to HAIWIRE in a moment, but first, a few details about the incredible official public relations response in recent days to real video of Biden’s decline:
