The Lawfare Podcast Lawfare Daily: Rethinking Deepfake Response with Gavin Wilde
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Sep 26, 2025 
Gavin Wilde, a Nonresident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins, tackles the intricate world of deepfakes. He explores their historical context, arguing that perceptions of deepfakes often stem from past media anxieties. Wilde discusses the limited impact of deepfakes in recent elections and emphasizes the need for a thoughtful approach beyond technology, focusing on issues like non-consensual imagery and voice scams.
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Institutional Backstops Matter More Than Tech
- Deepfakes' epistemic threat is overstated; social and institutional processes shape knowledge more than any single technology.
- Reinforce libraries, journalism, evidentiary rules, and credentialing rather than betting only on detectors.
History Shows Entertainment Comes First
- New audiovisual technologies mostly find use in entertainment and culture before causing the predicted political upheavals.
- Historical fears of obsolescence routinely proved exaggerated as older media adapted and coexisted.
Early Media Regularly Included Fakery
- Early photos were routinely hand-painted to fix technical limits, and early audio often used staged recreations of speeches.
- Society only accepted audiovisual media as evidence well into the 1900s.