“Who are you going to trust? Me or your lying eyes?” – Groucho Marx
If there was any image from the 2014 Model Town carnage that remained stuck in the public’s imagination – other than the gruesome images of the corpses – was that of a PML-N supporter named Gullu Butt vandalising cars parked outside the compound of the Minhaj-ul-Quran.
The League, for all its flaws, is not the “Punjab’s MQM” that the PTI alleges it is. (The only other political party in Pakistan that has an MQM-like disposition is the Jamaat-e-Islami.) But these images of Gullu Butt certainly didn’t help in dispelling those allegations. Butt’s tiger motif T-shirt and his very surname were the cherry on top. But Gullu denied all of that. Yes, denied all the “baseless” allegations against him.
“I am a loving person and people meet me with respect. It is not my fault that the media is portraying me as a terrorist. I am not a terrorist,” he said at a press conference on the 27th of October, 2014.
If the initial incident itself wasn’t so harrowing, you might have even called Butt’s brazen denial charming. This column has been used to describe the downright scary developments in the field of audio-visual manipulation.
Developments that would make video evidence absolutely inadmissible, not just of the circumstantial variety. Software like Adobe’s Voco, a computer can, after being fed just a couple of minutes of an individual’s speech, “speak” whatever text one has written in their voice. It can even mimic intonations. Couple that with the increasingly sophisticated rotoscoping and masking software available, and we’ve got a recipe for disaster.
In fact, as opposed to Voco, this particular software isn’t just limited to specialist editing suites like those of Adobe, but has also worked its way down to consumer level apps as well! But perhaps no bit of computer software is as powerful as the proclivity of the human mind to believe whatever it wants. Gullu Butt’s denial might elicit guffaws even from the supporters of the League. But were he an actual leader of the party, he might actually have had his share of believers.
Consider US President Donald Trump’s infamous Access hollywood audio tapes. The man had boasted to host Billy Bush about having groped and fondled unwilling women.
“When you’re a celebrity, they let you do anything,” he was recorded as saying.
The release of the tapes had a massive fallout and Trump was now certainly expected lose the elections as a result of it. That he still didn’t lose is the subject of many other political columns that we will not bother ourselves with in this space. What makes this case relevant to our topic today is the change in Trump’s response. Back when the tapes were leaked, he made a video apology.
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course – not even close. I apologise if anyone was offended.”
Well, now he is changing his line after having apologised for it, he has ordered an investigation into the episode.
“We don’t think that was my voice,” the New York Times quotes Trump as telling a Republican senator. If he actually decides to go with a denial, expect his region of supporters to believe him.
We don’t even need to go out of the country to understand this phenomenon. Recently, supporters of the PTI were found on facebook, sharing a video of news item that had claimed that Saudi Arabian authorities had named Nawaz Sharif in corruption cases and had started an investigation against him.
Far from the sophisticated mathematical wizardry of the upper-tier software mentioned earlier, some antiLeague charlatan had simply used the clunky text-to-voice software packages found in, say, PDf readers.
You don’t even need to be an audio-visual expert to immediately recognise the tinny Uncanny Valley voice of the “newscaster.” That, and the fact that the voice was not matching the lips of the announcer. Not even in the slightest. The fellow who put this video together knew that the sheer belief of the supporters of the PTI would more than make up for any shortcomings in production value.
“Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.” – Snatch (2000 film)
