AI’s Next Gift to Evil: Forced Confession Propaganda in China

(Torture reenactment - Minghui.org); Inset: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Commentary

Terror extortion, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) “deepfake” technology, can target millions of individuals worldwide simultaneously every day. My previous article, “Human Impersonation AI Must Be Outlawed,” explains why such crimes of fraud and aggression at the “micro” level warrant outlawing human impersonation AI systems.

The next big thing in totalitarianism will be at the “macro” level: deepfake AI human impersonation show trials and forced confessions.

Made famous by genocidal dictator Joseph Stalin in the USSR, publicized trials of political opponents and accused “enemies of the state” inevitably produce convictions. The convicts are then paraded in front of cameras and crowds to “confess” their “crimes,” beg for forgiveness that is never to be granted, and praise the regime for capturing and correcting them. What follows are long prison terms in forced labor camps or speedy executions.

Booming Business of Forced Confessions

China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been forcing accused people to publicly confess to serious crimes and then shaming and humiliating them nationwide in videos.

In “We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State” (2020), long-time China resident, journalist, and author Kai Strittmatter reported: “Since the summer of 2013, the state broadcaster CCTV [China Central Television] has been delivering to its viewers a never-ending parade of people who have been arrested or previously ‘disappeared.’ In the course of ‘interviews’ mostly filmed in prison, they play the role of the repentant sinner confessing to their misdeeds—long before they ever get to see a lawyer, let alone the inside of a courtroom.”

Typically, the CCP obtains the confessions through direct torture or threats against families.

Mr. Strittmatter recounted how the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) targets dissidents. He said civil rights lawyers “must live with the constant surveillance and intimidation of family members, friends, and landlords.”

“They are regularly summoned for interrogation, placed under house arrest, put into secret or official prisons,” he said. “Some vanish without a trace for long periods, are tortured, or locked away in psychiatric hospitals.”

In a seminal 2018 monograph, “Scripted and Staged: Behind the Scenes of China’s Forced TV Confessions,” Safeguard Defenders researchers analyzed 45 confessions televised between 2013 and 2018 and found that all were “routinely forced and extracted through threats, torture, and fear.”

The CCP police dictated the confessions, and the regime used the videos “as tools of propaganda for both domestic audiences and as part of China’s foreign policy.”

Reportedly, the interviewees said the police took charge of the confessions, including dressing them in costume, writing the script and making them memorize it, giving instructions on how to deliver the lines (including, in one case, telling the person to weep), and filming multiple retakes until satisfied with the results. One interviewee said he spent seven hours on the recording of just a few minutes of broadcast.

Torture to extract confessions is common. As reported by Mary Hong in The Epoch Times in April 2023: “Li Zhuang, once a Beijing lawyer, posted a video on April 4 describing methods local police of Li County, Baoding City, employed to torture a victim to extract confessions. The methods included waterboarding, prying the mouth open with a screwdriver, inserting chopsticks into the urethra, and feeding with laundry detergent.”

The CCP continues to use the confession videos for propaganda and population control. Safeguard Defenders reported on CCDI’s four episodes broadcast during Jan. 6–9, featuring the confessions of 29 significant figures in custody and many others not yet detained. These resembled the four episodes of forced confessions broadcast in January 2023, when the people admitted to serious crimes before most of them had even had a trial.

AI Deepfake Confessions

Using deepfake AI, the CCP and all totalitarians can now skip the middleman; professional torturers will lose their jobs. AI-powered human impersonation can create videos of the accused person confessing, crying, begging, groveling—all the details appearing in a video so lifelike that even relatives will believe it. And all without bothering to actually threaten or torture.

Engage AI to study body, face, movements, and voice and then just “disappear” the person. All the regime will need is the video file to broadcast nationally or worldwide.

Disappearing a person without torture pays off because the victim can never escape, smuggle out messages, or otherwise reveal the regime’s methods. Deepfake gives the regime all the propaganda and terror without the downsides of a living victim.

Political Solution: Public Suicide

If the regime deploys AI systems to create confession videos, why not take the next step? The pitiful “convict” is going to disappear without a trace anyway, but rumors of his or her survival might circulate. The easy solution: deepfake public suicide.

After the deepfake “person” confesses to everything on video, it commits suicide by taking cyanide or cutting its own throat on camera. People nationwide can watch it all and see that the “person” is dead. No rumors will circulate; nobody will search for the missing person in a prison camp somewhere. And the rule by terror will surpass even Stalin’s wildest dreams.

Killer Innovation: Public Witnesses Murders

Not to ignore powerful technology, the regime can fashion the AI system to display a group of accused persons methodically shooting each other with pistols on video, with the last survivor shooting himself or herself. Viewers will see that each of the prisoners committed cold-blooded murder, so each deserved to die. No one will look for them anymore. Their disappearance will be fully understandable.

Propaganda Overload Delivers the Mind-Numbing Victory

Some may argue that people will figure out that the videos are deepfakes and ignore them. Maybe so in some cases, but the “disappeared” people will never return, so nobody will really know.

More importantly, as Mr. Strittmatter explained, the public confession and humiliation videos yield propaganda benefits: “The main aim of these forced TV confessions is to parade a few individuals as examples to scare the larger community into [toeing] the party line and to instill ‘discipline’ and political loyalty into the wider industry/field. A few victims are used as tools to silence the larger community they represent.”

If the public confession videos become frequent, if the regime overloads people with propaganda that can’t be countered, the regime still wins.

Mr. Strittmatter observed: “The tactic works even on those who don’t fall for the spectacle [but] see it for the theater of the absurd that it is. The staged confessions are so hair-raising, and make such a mockery of every last semblance of the rule of law, that they serve as a persuasive demonstration of the all-powerful, despotic state. Only a lunatic would dare go up against it.”

When the propaganda is so constant and at times quite horrific, even if unbelievable, the result is millions of people fully embracing their own hopelessness and condition. They can’t know the truth, so the truth doesn’t matter and never will.

For totalitarians and despots everywhere, AI human impersonation video technology promises no-mess rule by terror to degrees never before imagined.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.