Show trials were originally made famous by genocidal dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) in the Soviet Union. They were widely publicized trials of his political opponents where they were accused as “enemies of the state.” The accusations inevitably produce convictions. The convicts were then paraded in front of cameras and crowds to “confess” their “crimes,” beg for forgiveness (never granted), and praise the regime for capturing and correcting them. Long prison terms in forced labor camps or speedy executions would follow.

How would AI help produce victims? “Deep fake” video technology. We previously saw, in “Human Impersonation AI Must be Outlawed,” how extortion videos could target millions of individuals worldwide simultaneously every day. The vast potential for such crimes of fraud and aggression at the “micro” level justify outlawing human impersonation AI systems. Such technology can readily rocket tyranny to the stratosphere.

Booming Business of Forced Confessions

For example, 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 on 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. Strittmatter recounted how the CCP Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) targets dissidents, such as:

Civil rights lawyers [who] 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. 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, finding 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.” As reported:

The interviewees described how the police took charge of the confession from dressing them in “costume”; writing the confession “script” and forcing the detainee to memorise it; giving directions on how to “deliver” their lines – including in one case, being told to weep; to ordering retake after retake when not satisfied with the result. One interviewee said he spent seven hours recording for what amounted to just a few minutes of broadcast.

Torture for confessions is common

As reported by Mary Hong in the Epoch Times (4/6/2023): 

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 on January 6-9, 2024, 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 can create deep fake confessions

Using deep fake AI, totalitarian regimes can now skip the middleman. Professional torturers will lose jobs. AI-powered human impersonation can create videos of the accused person confessing, crying, begging, groveling. All the details appearing in a video so life-like that even relatives will believe it. And all without bothering to actually threaten or torture. Engage AI to study body, face, movements, and voice, 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. Deep fake gives the regime all the propaganda and terror without the downsides of a living victim.

Political Solution: Public Suicide

Consider the possibilities: 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: deep fake public suicide.

After the deep fake “person” confesses to everything on video, then it commits suicide by taking cyanide or cutting its own throat on camera. People nationwide can watch it all and see 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.

A regime could even fashion the AI system to display a group of accused persons methodically shooting each other with pistols on video, the last survivor blowing his own brains out. 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 the videos are deep fakes and ignore them. Maybe so. But the “disappeared” people will never return, so nobody will really know.

More important, as 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 towing 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. 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. [Emphasis added.]

When state propaganda is easily generated, millions will fully embrace their own hopeless inability to know the truth. It doesn’t matter and never will.

AI human impersonation video technology promises rule by terror to degrees never before imagined.

An earlier version first appeared in The Epoch Times (3/20/2024)